Overview
For readers drawn to complex family narratives, a contemporary memoir about uncovering a life-altering family secret.
A Family Across Town is a memoir about secrecy, legacy, and the long shadow of a father’s hidden life. Aynah Askanas and her siblings grew up in a Los Angeles suburb with a pediatrician father whose frequent absences were explained away as "hospital emergency calls." Only in adulthood did they learn the truth: for decades, their father had maintained a second family across town.
With that revelation, the fragments of their childhood fell into place--their father’s missed holidays, secret phone calls, and irrational refusal to bring them to hospital and office social gatherings where colleagues knew only his other family. All were part of a carefully managed double life. Living on the inside of this secret took a toll. Their father endured constant anxiety and dependence on sleeping pills. Their mother struggled with depression as she navigated a relationship built on deception. The siblings carried the emotional consequences into adulthoods marked by insomnia, anxiety, and a persistent sense of something perverse being withheld.
A powerful, clear-eyed, and compassionate memoir, A Family Across Town examines what children absorb when truth is concealed and what it takes to reckon with the past after deep-rooted secrets emerge.
A Family Across Town is a memoir about secrecy, legacy, and the long shadow of a father’s hidden life. Aynah Askanas and her siblings grew up in a Los Angeles suburb with a pediatrician father whose frequent absences were explained away as "hospital emergency calls." Only in adulthood did they learn the truth: for decades, their father had maintained a second family across town.
With that revelation, the fragments of their childhood fell into place--their father’s missed holidays, secret phone calls, and irrational refusal to bring them to hospital and office social gatherings where colleagues knew only his other family. All were part of a carefully managed double life. Living on the inside of this secret took a toll. Their father endured constant anxiety and dependence on sleeping pills. Their mother struggled with depression as she navigated a relationship built on deception. The siblings carried the emotional consequences into adulthoods marked by insomnia, anxiety, and a persistent sense of something perverse being withheld.
A powerful, clear-eyed, and compassionate memoir, A Family Across Town examines what children absorb when truth is concealed and what it takes to reckon with the past after deep-rooted secrets emerge.
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