One October morning in 2019, my father came to my apartment, already in trouble when I opened the door, to tell me the family secret.
I was in my pajamas. I plan to spend the morning playing a video game. By the time my dad left two hours later, I, too, had the information I needed, and I needed to interrupt me from working. Now, my need to relax and escape life was not what I wanted – it was something I wanted, right away. I went straight to Twitter and asked for a recommendation for a new video game.
I have always been interested in alternative, rich indie media; the last two games I've played and my favorite have been Oxenfree and A night in the woods. Almost immediately, two faithful friends say the game I heard the name, but I know nothing about. I picked it up, excited to get into a new game with no experience, and excited about running away from thinking about my family for a while.
The game, The remainder Edith Finch, it came all about the secrets that the family keeps, why they last, and how those secrets affect each generation. It was not a way to escape. But it was cathartic.
Edith Finch takes place at the Finch family's home on Orcas Island off the coast of Washington state. Over the years, additional Finnish rooms have been illegally built on the site, giving us an unsafe and confusing building. The Finch family puts a seal on each room when their owner dies, making the house a collection of periodic pills. Edith Finch writes about her family's journey through the diary, read aloud as a fairy tale while exploring.
The Finch family was like my own kind. In need of air-conditioned rooms, we set up statues. My grandfather's house in Phoenix, Arizona used to have an entire room dedicated to photo albums, as well as asking family and its stories for several generations before their father left Sicily. My dad's college courses were photography, and I was the only one of my generation, including cousins, who didn't at least take a photo class. But still I still have DSLRs and film cameras.
One of the first things I ever took was a picture of my grandfather's fig tree in the back of his place, grown from a fig tree at my grandfather's home in southern New Jersey, raised in a fig tree from a family home in Sicily. When my dad graduated from Arizona State, he was injured taking the whole family. My grandfather started teaching sociology at university. Decades later, my older sister received her degree there. Ten years later, I started working with students there, even though I often said I was leaving the family tradition of attending or working at school.
Growing up in the late 1990s in Gilbert, a suburb of the Stepford-esque neighborhood of Phoenix, I was constantly bombarded with photos of my grandfather, who had just died. My family has been telling me how much I have in common, in personality and in appearance. I have her curls. People tell me I roll my eyes as he does. My birth name was almost the same as his – my parents wanted to name me, but they worried that it was lucky to name the baby by a woman who was, at the time, on the verge of death.
In my most trying years, I wished my grandmother was well. I thought it might be the kind of person in the family that I could tell my secrets when no one else was in me. There are still secrets I keep in my family because I was convinced that telling her her spirit was enough.
Room for the first family member to attend Edith Finch is that of Molly, Finch who died in infancy. "I grew up looking at Molly's room by the pool," Edith said in a voice as you neared the door. "Molly always seemed to be the girl I thought she would be friends with, had she not died in 1947."
Molly's room is the same size as the letters. Its pink walls are adorned with Rapirlel-eque swirls of gold. The sea monster is pulled from the board, with an animal mask inserted at the door, and a duck sack set on the desk. Molly loved the whimsy and the fun adventure, displayed in the vignette you played the night she died. After eating poisonous berries, Molly immerses herself into a cat, a shark, and a stuffed sea monster that eats her human body in her room. The vignette is as beautiful as it is hypocritical, leaving the player to realize what really happened. Molly is committed to her story. He is you did it turn to those creatures. Some family members believe him, or at least embarrass him; the family cat for the next generation is named "Molly" to be honored. To the actor, however, it is clear that Molly's story is untrue.
After finishing Molly's vignette, I set the controller down and thought about my family.
Finally, my dad had discovered our family's biggest secret for a few months before he came to my apartment to tell me. All thanks to the genetics company 23andMe, which promises to tell you everything about your genealogy when you send them your candy. Always willing to try any new way of enriching our family, my dad, brother, and dad think it would be fun to look at their results and see what new information they can find.
When my dad and his brother linked their results to their dad, they found something they were not ready for. Results 23I also indicate that the man they believed to be their father was actually their uncle.
My grandmother, the wrinkled-up woman like me, the woman to whom I had been confiding my secrets, was obviously in love with her husband's brother long enough to conceive both father and brother. The man I had known all my life as "grandfather" was actually my great uncle. My natural grandfather, like my grandmother, had died years ago. Like him, he had taken the secret to his grave.
Logically, this shouldn't have changed anything. Everyone in my family agreed that what makes a father is an act of parenting, not biology. But I felt shaken and moved away. Who was this man, my natural grandfather, who had his “real” family for my second cousin and their children across the country? Who was this woman, my grandmother, who was included in my family everywhere, to whom I was compared in my best times?
My paternal uncle – mine real grandfather – take the news as much as possible. He said: "I wish he had told me, so I would let him have someone he truly loved." My father, telling me all this, tried to take it as kindly as he had. I'm close to him and we've never had it before, I went to him while he was crying in my bed.
My dad came out of my apartment after a long time of confinement, both of us still trembling, but equally insistent on giving that risk to anyone outside those walls. I started The remainder Edith Finch about an hour later. At that hour, I cried, looked at the roof, and called my husband to work to explain to him what had happened. I had to explain it a few times in the beginning, because it was so strange that you went under simply to say it.
As I continued to play The remainder Edith Finch Several times I stopped to consider how I was feeling. I have played some vignettes showing the deaths of other family members. I flew the kite as the poems appeared on the screen, all the while ignoring the impending storm that would ruin an important family event. I played in another episode, when a factory worker dreamed of playing games to escape his humdrum life, and I felt embarrassed, but I realized, in my attempt to escapism about the game. As I reached the end of the event showing fathers and pictures, I cried.
The remainder Edith Finch it's about the memory, but especially the memories we choose to hold on to, the memories we choose to override. A family story written in rooms on a wall is not much different than a family story written in a room full of photo albums. Both are cold periods included in time.
A young girl who dies at an early age, like Molly, can be shown a cheerful glow from a sealed room, but until you can go read a journal that you can see is complicated, she was sent to bed without lunch because she was abusive. Granny can be pictured in photos of her holding my dad as a kid, celebrating Christmas at their new home in Phoenix, eating a knife with curls that look just like mine. No photos show screaming, crying, or frustration. If anything was taken, that part of the story could be removed by discarding the print and it wouldn't matter.
I don't have a book telling me who my grandmother really was. He took this secret to his grave. All I have is the results of a genetic test that he would never expect and would never answer for himself. But as I played more of the game, Edith exploring her family secrets led me to what it might have sounded like. I set my consideration aside and, instead, tried to include him.
When I finished playing, I felt at least as though I was standing on solid wood instead of leveling on haphazard scaffolding. In evaluations of complexity-related activities take on grief, family, secrets, and identity, Edith Finch helped me process my own.
This past Christmas, preparing to visit my uncle's house, I took 60 milliliters of Duloxetine, a prescription I knew I needed more than ever. Not because we would all talk about our family, but because we would close the whole timeline. When I look at my uncle's home, it's struck me that there are no photos around. It was artistic, but it was just invisible. I wondered how he had published his chosen family art form, or if he just found it uncomfortable or cut into it before this happened.
I knew we wouldn't talk about the effects of 23and. I knew we would never talk about one of my sisters skipping the party altogether, even though my parents brought her son, my nephew. I knew I wasn't going to talk about aspects of my identity while I was there, and I'm still discovering – parts of myself that I would have shared with my grandmother's thought. Instead, I watched as my niece, excited, opened up a gift from someone who raised my dad: a new camera.
Wil Williams A writer of culture and a man dedicated to unpleasant media. You can find them on Twitter at @wilw_writes, where they probably talk about podcasts.
