43 pages • 1 hour read
Tarryn FisherThe Wrong Family
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The House
Content Warning: This section of the guide references substance use disorders and kidnapping.
The Crouches’ house is more than just the center of most of the action of the novel: It is also a symbol of safety and rest for Juno, of perfection for Winnie, and of The Weight of Secrets within the novel as a whole. Juno, who is unhoused and seriously ill with lupus, sees the house on Turlin Street as an ideal place to live. She’s fascinated by the ties that bind the Crouch family and begins to follow them. Once in the house, she quickly finds that it provides all she needs to live a better life. She can be safe out of the elements, find pain medication to ease the symptoms of her illness, have access to bathrooms and laundry facilities, and eat plenty of food. Even the Crouches’ nearby presence is a boon, as it allows her to indulge her obsessive curiosity. The way in which she insinuates herself into the Crouches’ home comes to symbolize the way in which she insinuates herself into other people’s lives.
For Winnie, the house represents the perfect life she is attempting to build. It is spacious, well furnished, and perfectly decorated, and Winnie makes sure that only healthy food is available in the refrigerator and keeps everything in good order. She hopes the house will spark the admiration of her friends, but when they come to visit for Friendsgiving, Dakota’s altercation with Sam and Nigel shatters The Illusion of Perfection. The façade of the perfect house is unable to hide the family secrets, and Fisher hammers that point home by making the home the hiding spot Nigel and Winnie chose for the corpse of Josalyn’s baby. Their burial of the body in the crawl space evokes the shaky foundations on which they have built their life together.
The crawl space also becomes a tomb for Dakota and Juno, whose bodies are discovered in the Epilogue. While Fisher does not explore the aftereffects, the implication is that all of the secrets hidden in the Crouches’ house will now finally come to light.
The Past
Juno and Winnie both are dealing with the consequences of their past actions, and the past rises as a motif in the novel as a result. For Winnie, the past overshadows her marriage, her parenting, her role in her family of origin as a sister, and her professional life. All her current difficulties result from choices made in the past that she cannot escape, no matter how hard she tries to ignore them. Winnie has not so much learned a lesson from her past as she has sought to pretend the past didn’t happen.
Juno has not learned from her past either, as her actions over the course of the novel demonstrate. She has seen time and again that crossing boundaries and getting too involved in others’ drama leads to loss and heartache for herself, yet she continues to intertwine her life more closely with the lives of the Crouches.
Addiction
The thriller genre often uses mental illness to generate intrigue or tension, sometimes drawing on harmful stereotypes when doing so (e.g., depicting people with a mental health condition as inherently violent or scary). The Wrong Family both conforms to and departs from this tradition, using a motif of addiction to parallel the harmful obsessions of characters like Juno and Winnie. Substance use is prevalent in the novel, including Nigel’s drinking and Josalyn’s drug use and Sam’s theft of Oxycontin. Dakota, meanwhile, is addicted not only to alcohol but also to gambling. The novel treats these addictions as analogous to Juno’s voyeurism and Winnie’s perfectionism, collapsing any distinctions society might draw between the domineering parenting of the upper-middle-class Winnie and the ineffectual efforts of Josalyn—an unhoused, teenage mother—to care for her baby. In both cases, Fisher suggests, the child suffers because of the parent’s addiction.
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By Tarryn Fisher
