I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey,
for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible,
than the story of our own life, the one we do not
want to hear and will do anything to listen to.

—Mary Ruefle, Deconstruction

Families are incredibly complex organisms, a fact as simple as the sky being blue, almost as factual as its blueness, and yet surprisingly underappreciated. Like all for-profit organizations, they can be sites of profound harm. Most children adapt to their families in order to survive. In some, you need to be invisible; in others, you need to perform: be loud, be funny, make money, or excel academically. In others, you need to fail and be made into a black sheep—carry the family’s collective faults to keep the system intact.

It is true that, in recent years, there has been a growing discourse—both in fiction and nonfiction—that critiques the family not just as a site of personal dysfunction but as an ideological structure that triggers and reproduces trauma. Novels such as Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms and memoirs like Harriet Brown’s Shadow Daughter portray the necessity and emotional complexity of estrangement from narcissistic or abusive parents. On the nonfiction front, Joshua Coleman’s Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict examine the psychological and social forces behind family breakups and show the statistics behind it, challenging the assumption that familial bonds must be preserved at all costs. And yet in the wider culture, even with this growing body of work that has culminated in Sophie Lewis’s recent radical call to abolish the family, criticizing or rejecting one’s own family is still framed as a betrayal.

Soon after reading Vigdis Hjorth’s novels Will and Testament and Is Mother Dead, I came across a video lecture she gave in my hometown, Tbilisi, at a literature festival. Georgia is an intensely family-oriented country: criticizing, let alone disowning one’s own family is unthinkable. No matter how they’ve wronged you, in society’s eyes, you’re the one at fault. You’re simply outnumbered, outpowered. Fairness and truth don’t enter the equation. You’ll be called dramatic, labeled a liar, accused of a vivid imagination. They’ll insist the matter is too “complicated” and that blame can’t be assigned easily. “Parents aren’t perfect,” they’ll say with a condescending tone, even though you never expected perfection. As the protagonist of Will and Testament says, “I often felt like being isolated in a combat situation.” Very few people will be willing to stick with you as soldiers in similar “wars.”

In Georgia, counter-narratives do not abound. Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß’s 2017 film My Happy Family offers a rare and incisive critique of the traditional Georgian family—not through melodrama, but through the quiet and radical act of a woman walking away from her family to continue her live alone. Manana, a schoolteacher in her 50s, doesn’t leave her multi-generational household because of some overt catastrophe, abuse, or scandal, but because she can no longer bear the erasure of selfhood. The film reveals how easily surveillance, obligation, and the suppression of individuality can be disguised as love, all in the name of collective harmony. Manana’s departure becomes a seismic rupture not because it is dramatic, but because it breaks the unspoken rule that a woman’s identity must dissolve into the duties of keeping the family intact.