Summer’s Complaint

Summer’s Complaint was described as a medical investigation, but I found it was much more of a family memoir. I mean that in a good way — I enjoy family sagas, and it was a pleasure meeting this large, close-knit clan.

Author Laura Kieger has seen “rare” cancers affect many of her relatives. She explains how healthy relatives take sick and die in their thirties,  but there’s no single cause. A wide variety of rare conditions keeps popping up among her mother’s relatives. For a while, I thought there was going to be an environmental exposure that affected the family.

The whole family marries young, and has kids early and often, so there’s plenty of opportunity to see how the family illness affects each generation. There’s also a charm in the close-knit relatives, and I really enjoyed some of the scenes of family life. Laura is one of eight children, in the free-range childhood days, with many stories of bothering and playing with her siblings. She remains close with her cousins, nieces and nephews, and extended family.

In between the medical mysteries, there’s time for family vacations. These are usually road trips with enforced family togetherness, but occasionally trips to Paris and New York. (Is there anything more adorably Midwestern than visiting Manhattan’s Hard Rock Cafe?) I enjoyed these sections, and “meeting” the relatives made it more moving when they waited to see how the family condition would affect each one.

Because this is a memoir, there’s no real story arc. The story opens on a funeral, without introducing who the mourners are, then jumps to the sweet teenage marriage of the author’s parents, with several chapters of backstory before the family illness is mentioned again. Later on, the author introduces new clues in the family’s genetic research, then drops that to chat about family reunions, and then swings back to the emotional realizations in a college bio course. Again, it’s all interesting but there’s no real narrative holding each scene together.

This memoir is an interesting ramble on how rare diseases, family connections, and the discovery of genetic conditions affects this family.