THE FAMILY ISSUE.

From 2000, Roger Angell remembers his father

"We are fam-ilee," the great old Sister Sledge single went, and then the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates swiped it and made it their own, riding that beat all the way into the World Series and winning with it, of course. Who doesn't want to be fam-ilee? Families aren't on our minds as much as they used to be, perhaps, but let's start counting, top of our heads. There is mine and yours and also the Kennedys and the Cosbys, the Cabots, the Bushes, the bin Ladens, the Roosevelts, the Alous, the Osbournes, the Barrymores, the Brontes, the Marx Brothers, the Jameses (William and Henry), and the Jameses (Jesse and Frank). Also the Jeffersons, the Gambinos, the Medicis, the Adamses, and the Addamses. The Guermantes. The Bachs, the Kallikaks, the Windsors, the Wallendas. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Jr.; Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. Saltonstalls and Pallisers, Fondas and Stuarts. The Dorsey Brothers and the brothers Duchamp (Marcel), Duchamp-Villon (Raymond), and Villon (Jacques). The Andrettis and the Pettys and the Earnhardts. The Bobbseys, the Romanoffs, and die Strausses Johann the Elder, Johann the Younger, Richard, and Levi. The Capets and the Capulets and, yes, the Carters. Jimmy and Rosalynn and Amy and Billy Carter; A. P., June, Maybelle, Helen, and Anita Carter; Gary Carter. Andrew Jackson. Michael, Jermaine, Jackie, Marlon, Tito, La Toya, and Janet Jackson. Stonewall Jackson. Reggie Jackson. Donald Duck; Huey, Dewey & Louie Duck. The Sopranos.

Some of these families are made up, some real; the difference keeps blurring or fading, thanks to the comix-book elasticity, the animating weirdness, of our own families now, and our appetite for scholarly or randy disclosure about the famous dead. Everyday American life, arriving by NPR or CNN on a bad morning, takes on dreamlike strangeness. "This can't be true," we cry, and then, in a murmur, "You wish." It dawns on us also that our own reliable family memories are probably being reshaped, day by day, to meet some private need. A memoir of mine about my father, published here three years ago, brought unexpected reactions from others in the family: "Oh, no," I heard. "He wasn't like that at all. Not with me."

This double issue of The New Yorker is a mixture of memoir and reporting about families; a prior family issue, just over a year ago, was mostly fiction. It's a surprise when you think of it, but most of the extended family portraits in this magazine have come from fiction writers--William Maxwell, Jhumpa Lahiri, John Cheever (his 1951 story "Goodbye, My Brother" inflicts a fresh bruise on each rereading), Alice Munro, Harold Brodkey, Lorrie Moore, John Updike, among others--and from poets like Philip Levine and Sharon Olds and Donald Hall. Maxwell and Updike have told their family stories again and again, musing and elaborating and rethinking--the way we all do, surely, in middle-of-the-night replay. Roz Chast and Edward Koren are ziggedy ...