Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America

Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America Carolyn See (Random House, $23) The thing about messed-up families is they make such compelling subjects. See's California clan-which she chronicles from the '40s to the present with painstaking detail and, despite everything, incredible love-is rife with the suffering of substance abuse. As a young child, See witnessed her parents living what she thought was the good life, including raucous weekends playing cards with friends and drinking (and drinking). Her father fled, leaving See to what she describes as her violent and alcohol-soaked mother. Eventually, she escaped, and after two of her own troubled marriages, became a celebrated writer. But family ties are never easily severed-which See came to regard as a positive circumstance in her life. When she observes her half brother following in their brood's boozy footsteps, we expect despair, or judgment. See, bravely, refuses to succumb to either: ''(T)here's something to be said for free fall, the wild life. It's ruined us, but it's helped to save us, too. It's given us our stories; and made us who we are.'' A- -EKC