Rebecca Fallon’s Family Drama finds sincerity in soap operas

Like all good TV dramas, Family Drama starts with a tragic death. Susan Bliss, a soap star who dies young, leaves behind twins Viola and Sebastian, who hide in “hysterics, loud and hiccuping” under a table while mourners circulate above them. Susan’s husband Al, once devoted to the point of suffocation, responds to her death by erasing her: destroying her work, sanitising her image, trying to protect his children from what he saw as her excesses. Acting had opened up a “parallel infinity” for Susan, but for Al it was time stolen from her family, wasted on “spicy stuff”.

This attempt at protection becomes its own violence. Al (“the husband! the historian!”) obliterates a “singular archive”, leaving the children to reconstruct their mother in fragments and fantasy. Sebastian idealises her, but Viola recoils from what she senses as Susan’s sexuality. “The problem is their mother,” Rebecca Fallon writes, “making her brother think that women are all vacant bodies, purpose-built for whatever men want to do to them.” The novel’s central conflict is set early: who gets to control a woman’s story, and at what cost to those left behind?

This is Fallon’s debut novel, and she grew up in New England, where much of the book is set: Susan is a “true New England woman”. The story moves gracefully across timelines, from Susan’s early ambition to her maternal devotion and marital disintegration, stitching these phases together with guilt. On set, everything is “fairy dust”, yet even dancing “in the midst of all the stardust she cannot help but feel like a terrible person”. The soap opera within the novel mirrors the novel itself – illicit love affairs, dramatic deaths. When Susan dies on screen, she asks her co-star Orson Grey, a handsome actor who reappears at thrillingly opportune moments: “Does any of this matter?”

To Fallon, it does. She hammers home the book’s guiding belief: “The only things that matter are love and sincerity.” While occasionally overindulging the dramatic – numerous mementos are, quite unnecessarily, burned, sliced, and drowned – these pages are filled with love, even as that love is strained and misshapen. Fallon’s faith in sincerity is disarming: she is willing to risk excess in order to argue that feeling, however compromised, is the most certain form of truth.

What keeps Family Drama from collapsing into melodrama is Fallon’s exquisite attention to physicality: children’s necks with their “sweet giggly folds”; a woman swimming whose breast “bubbles out of her bra”; people breathing each other in, registering “the unfamiliar way he smells after a month without her”, clinging on to the “hazy smell” of a “half-lidded” morning. Desire arrives on the breath, illness through the domestic horror of a sweet potato whose “core was liquid and wrong”.

A soap opera may deal in illusion, but Family Drama returns us to the body – as proof of love, damage, and the inheritances parents leave behind, willingly or otherwise.

Family Drama by Rebecca Fallon is published by Borough Press (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph of Rebecca Fallon by Sophie Davidson