When Jennifer Mascia was five years old, her father was taken away by the FBI. It was the first sign that there was something different about her family—a difference that Mascia only dimly understood during her childhood, despite years of mysterious name changes, financial instability, and her father's unexplained absences. Despite a few eyebrow-raising moments as a teenager, it wasn't until Mascia was in her early twenties that she finally began looking into her family's past. A Internet search revealed the details of her father's criminal history, and further questioning of her mother lead to a veritable torrent of terrifying family secrets, including adultery, drug dealing, and murder.

Never Tell Our Business to Strangers is both a straight-up memoir of an unconventional childhood and Mascia's attempt to understand how her loving-if-flawed parents justified their unjustifiable actions. The book is successful on the first front but fails on the second—despite recording the nuanced memories of her parents' friends and relatives (and the professional opinions of psychologists), Mascia's father still comes across as monstrous, and her willfully deluded mother doesn't fare much better.

Mascia has spent the past few years working as the nightside news assistant for The New York Times, and her book reflects her journalistic training—i.e., even at its creepiest, it's still quite easy to read. One has to wonder, however, what catharsis Mascia achieved by writing it, apart from what was hopefully a large enough advance to cover decades of therapy. Is this the way she wants her parents to be remembered? What about her half-siblings from her father's first marriage? How do they feel? Is this truly what she wants to be known for? It's tough to imagine what it must have been like to grow up with parents like the people Mascia describes, but it's even tougher to imagine that writing a take-out-every-skeleton-in-the-closet tell-all like Never Tell Our Business to Strangers could be anything but a very mixed blessing.

[Review based on publisher-provided copy.]

Labels: Book Reviews, Nonfiction