The secret life of families

ANTHOLOGY: Are We Related? The New Granta Book of the FamilyEdited by Liz Jobey Granta Books, 408pp, £20.00

HOW GLORIOUS it is to edit a book of fiction and fact about family. Are We Related? The New Granta Book of the Familyedited by Liz Jobey proves that such a task has no frontiers. You might just as well edit a book about everything since all human life is here in this faulty and fissured crucible.

Though I have never been a subscriber to Granta, the quarterly magazine of new writing, my bookshelves sag with the quantity of random issues I've acquired over the years. I won't be shunting them off to the charity shop either, because Granta's contract with the reader to provide the best fiction and fact about how we live now has never wavered and is consistently stimulating and engaging.

To say that Are We Related? is a delight to read sounds almost Victorian in its sentiment; it suggests an improving book that will not tarnish the tender mind of some unspecified Victorian young person – it also rather undermines some of the harsh, uncomfortable truths between these covers. Yet it is a delight to again meet McGahern, still alive in writing about the people of the lakeshore (I had been too sad about his absence to re-read him) or to meet again the Anne Enright story Little Sister which I first read in Granta's Brief Encountersin 2001. The fact that I remembered the story a thousand stories later speaks of its quality.

To my shame I hadn't got around to reading Diana Athill, despite holding a huge mental cache of newspaper-acquired information about her – here, her autobiographical fiction Alive, Alive-Ohabout a middle-aged woman who suddenly finds herself pregnant by her married lover, is a poignant examination of subconscious wish-fulfillment as the protagonist's body buds with the arrival of the April blossoms.

In her introduction to the collection, Liz Jobey refers to Granta's first volume on family, They Fuck You Up(also on my shelves), which took its title from the immortal Larkin poem. Here Jobey puts more emphasis on its closing verse:

Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./ Get out as early as you can,/ And don’t have any kids yourself.

And there certainly are depictions of family in Are We Related?where kids are begotten and casually tormented or distorted. Jeremy Seabrook writes about his monstrous mother who cleaved such a chasm between him and his twin brother that separation has been the keynote of his life.

Edmund White's forgiving portrait of his lonely, drunken mother Lila Mae does not stop the reader being appalled at a woman who asks her son to squeeze out her blackheads or to pull fast her stays over juddering flesh all the while ignoring that "her black bush was visible just below the bottom of her girdle". McGahern's Guard Harkin in Love of the Worldis one of his chilly patriarchs, a white-headed boy gone bad who has peculiar resonance in an Ireland still seemingly inured to so-called crimes of passion.

But if there is dark there is also light and warmth. Scottish writer AL Kennedy writes about her amateur-boxer grandfather Joseph Henry Price in A Blow to the Headand captures exactly what it is like to have been the apple of someone's eye – the much-loved and admired granddaughter of a man who possessed those old-fashioned manly virtues of great strength of will and endurance cut through with kindliness and benevolence.

Equally, Jayne Anne Phillips' short story Mothercaredepicts the troika of Kate, a bewildered new mother, her baby son, and Kate's mother enclosed in a snow-blanketed house – the endless grimness of early motherhood is leavened by the anchor of the older woman's presence; her surety makes everything normal and whole and possible even though her own mortality is in view.

In the closing paragraph of Twins Jeremy Seabrook writes "George Eliot once wrote of Nature as 'a great tragic dramatist' that unites people by flesh and bone and then divides them by temperament and character" and it seems to me that this is a summation of all that you will find between the engrossing covers of Are We Related?

If you were to buy one last hardback before December’s Budget (or, let’s face it, ever) this might be the one to choose.

Yvonne Nolan is an independent television producer/director