The Family Law

What a funny, funny book this was – a total unexpected gem. I’d read Benjamin Law in snippets in The Age and Frankie magazine, and this is his full-length autobiographical effort. And I’m going to make a call and see it’s almost in the Sedaris league for laugh out loud wrongness. For me, who was born in the same year as Law (1982) and found absolutely all of his pop culture and nostalgic references spot on, I couldn’t help laughing hysterically at points in the point.

Basically it’s a collection of essays on his strange but lovable family. The son of hardworking Chinese immigrants, Law grows up in Brisbane and deals with his parent’s divorce, adolescence, coming out and growing up – all with a crude yet touching sense of humour (my favourite kind). None of his trials and tribulations are anything special (he doesn’t get abused, bullied or hit by some mystery illness), he just approaches everyday things a slightly twisted outlook.

Law’s mum is particularly awesome, and there’s a section involving the term ‘vagina meat’ and another involving a family trip where they speculate on Minnie Mouse getting raped at Disneyland that sends them all into fits of laughter, that really show this family's warped sense of humour. I couldn’t get enough of it. Also the section where he remembers watching the movie IT with his older brother and “my nine year old brain almost had a stroke from the fear” was something I totally related to, having also had this same experience.

It’s interesting that Law thanks fellow writer and friend Alice Pung in his author acknowledgements, as I read her account of growing up Asian in Australia, Unpolished Gem, earlier this year. Law has managed to pull off what I think Pung would have liked to, but I think she got a bit scared of embarrassing her family and pulled back a bit, where with Law, nothing is sacred. And this book is so much better for it. It also reminded me a little of what Judith Lucy attempted to do with her Lucy Family Alphabet, but there was a bit of a sinister undertone to her writing – she came across a bit displaced by her upbringing, and you were never certain that her family acted out of love; in The Family Law, there is crassness and silliness, but love is clearly abound.