Every Family Has a Story: How We Inherit Love and Loss
JULIA SAMUEL
(PENGUIN LIFE, 320 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

Certain expressions annoy Julia Samuel. She wants to ban the term “over-emotional” for instance, and the unhelpful notion of a “process of grief”. She mistrusts cliché and tries to avoid stereotypes, and, most of all, she disagrees vehemently with Tolstoy’s glib assertion that “All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We cannot expect always to be blissfully happy: most families find ways of adapting to circumstances. And if they get stuck, she can help.

An experienced and empathetic psycho­therapist, whose previous two books, Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass, have been highly praised, she likes to look back in time to find the root cause of a problem, before involving as many generations as possible in its disentangling. For this book she chooses eight real cases to discuss, all of them with different challenges. Having changed their names, she introduces them in turn, with a brief outline of their situations and then a near-verbatim, chronological account of her sessions with them. The narrative becomes increasingly engaging as, alongside Samuel, we learn to know and understand them more, and to care about them all.