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Holy Family
Alice Bolstridge

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PROJECT STATUS: This book has been proposed as a project and is now seeking team members. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen. Holy Family is a novel about an aging unschooled artist, Amelia Hardy, the narrator. Not religious, she is nevertheless fascinated from childhood by the Holy Family as a subject for art. She lives in the family farmhouse where she grew up and takes care of Justin, her youngest brother, mentally disabled all his adult life with schizophrenia. Justin’s care becomes increasingly difficult, and her other siblings—Eliza, Thurston, Willard, and Carl—urge her to give up his care and place him in a nursing home. Amelia’s distress about Justin’s care is fed by memories of other major conflicts in the family and community over three generations. These conflicts fuel her art work which is described throughout the novel. From earliest childhood, Amelia draws, colors, and paints. At book’s end she is planning her magnum opus, 13 panels depicting a Holy Family in the center surrounded by community, farming, and wilderness scenes. I view these characters and this setting as a microcosm of society’s ills, a landscape and cultural climate that expose primal fears, rages, and loves which drive human relationships and remain mostly lost to consciousness while simultaneously bleeding through in individual expression. Amelia’s landscapes and portraits are colored by these emotions, and as she ages, and as her care of Justin becomes more difficult, her drive to express grows more insistent. It is a major plot complication. In these ways, Holy Family is something of a philosophical novel, dramatizing the role of art in experience and the interplay between cultural and personal expressions of experience. Notes on the Project: Four stories from this book have been published. In a review of An Intricate Weave, which includes another story from the novel, Publishers Weekly (March 10, 1997) says, “Although outstanding authors such as Lucille Clifton, Julia Alvarez and Alice Walker are represented, many contributors are lesser known but write with talent and sensitivity. Alice Bolstridge offers a haunting fictional description of a young girl overwhelmed by family problems . . . .” Some readers of this book see it as grim, but I believe Amelia’s vision is ultimately a comic one. She never gives up hope; her sense of life’s value remains affirmative; her strength and survival attest to that; and she often reviews her heritage and herself with some degree of humor, however dark the undertones.