November 9th, 2026 - Family Lore
Dear TNY,
“Family Lore” is good.
The pacing is rock solid as it builds the tension across an objectively humorous scenario. Not all the characters are fully fleshed, but that’s okay because they don’t need to be. The one who is, the husband, is what matters. The narrative harkens back to the absurd yet relatable narratives of the eighties; stories like “Feathers” by Raymond Carver come to mind. And it was over 8k words, but it was written so well I didn’t even notice.
My one quibble is the author’s use of the spelling, “dialled.” I did check. This is the British spelling. Your magazine, TNY, isn’t British. And neither is the author. So what gives? Pretentiousness?
As this sprawling story unfolded, I found myself more and more invested in where it was going, but not knowing where it was going. This is a good thing. The author really understood how to keep the reader in. But for me, the story peaked at:
There was so much to lose, and so many different ways to lose it.
This is what made me cry (it’s essentially the end of a story I brought up recently, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” by Wells Tower). I had hoped the author would finish strongly on such a well-told story. There is a real fear that the author can’t pull it off when the reader is in the middle of a story that feels like a good one. So much rides on that crescendo, and this author crushed it. It wasn’t flat. Or grandiose. It would have been had the dog left or got hit by the car. But it’s the fact that the dog comes back and the man realizes what life is. That it’s all love, in point of fact. This story itself is love. And the clumsy fumblings that love entails. And for that, it’s beautiful.
And how am I doing, you might ask?
I am, unequivocally, happy. I could write about the gem and mineral museum I visited recently, and the largest space rock collection in the world that it contains. I could tell you all the details about the work I’m doing, which at this point is just bunk bed and helmet cubby stuff. I could regale you with facts about Alzheimer’s or the cosmos or Sir Patrick Stewart’s sparkle (RIP). It could talk about the beauty in a look or how my mother taught my brother and I how to swim before we had memories, such that later in life, around eight years old, when she booked us swim lessons to see how we were doing, the coach told my brother and I to go swim by ourselves at the deep end of the pool as we did not need lessons, us, taking turns, one of us swimming to the bottom to hold a weight that the coach put there, and the other swimming through the arch of the splayed legs of the other, that sunken person pulling themselves tight to the floor with the weight, the swimmer plunging down to somehow wriggle through the legs, above the bottom of the pool, and around the weight, all before tapping the sunken person’s nutsack, intentionally, causing the whole operation to desperately surface, laugh, tussle, and do over again. I could tell you about blonde hair and green eyes and small hands and the cooiest of cooing sounds in the night, the kind of sounds that say, “I’m home.”
I could tell you a lot of shit.
But I’m not.
I’m just fucking happy. And there is so much to lose, and so many ways to lose it. But I knew that before I read this story, which is why this story hit so hard, and now I’m just taking all this life in, doing inventory every day, finding myself surrounded by treasures more rich than those in The Cave of Wonders. And there’s not a second that goes by where I’m not aware of it or appreciating it.
Nick
