‘“We’re not people – we’re family.”’ What had stuck in my mind from previous readings of ‘Some Other, Better Otto’ was its central set piece, a fraught family Thanksgiving. I hadn’t previously read it, however, as an investigation – glimpsed amid glittering, razor-sharp jokes that distract and deflect – of the wound of internalised homophobia. As he braces himself for the dreaded celebration, we come to understand that the vulnerable, cynical Otto has learned a sense of unworthiness in which the microaggressions of his family, unintended through they may be, have played a part. Deeply insecure about his deserving of love, he spends much of this story trying to drive away his almost saintly partner: “Why had lovely William stayed with disagreeable old him for all this time?” Eisenberg gives Otto a counterweight, another satellite sibling trying to avoid the rest of the family: his sister Sharon, a brilliant scientist with mental health issues (an early line that made me bark with laughter – when she supplies a swift and confident answer to a question he considers abstruse, Otto is moved to question expertise: “Strange, you really couldn’t tell, half the time, whether someone was knowledgeable or insane” – becomes poignant as Sharon’s story is revealed). You can’t pick your relatives, as they say, but you can choose how you deal with them and you can construct a new kind of family – lovers, allies, those others with whom you have shared experiences, and fears, and injuries.
First published in The Yale Review, January 2003, and available to read here; Collected in Twilight of the Superheroes, Picador, 2006
A Personal Anthology 