Family, in the Hickey family novels

I'm obsessed with families. So are lots of the characters I create.
Maybe this is why. I had an evil grandma who perpetrated things I prefer to fictionalize rather than tell straight out, partly because I don't remember her well enough to be fair. And I had a angelic grandma, who painted landscapes and wrote poetry and told the world's best stories (her abbreviated versions of classics).

My mom and dad were good folks, who didn't do well with money. So, when I was two we lost our home and moved in with grandma (the angelic one) and grandpa and one uncle. For a few years it was paradise to me, the big old house with secret crannies, surrounded by an acre of pine, eucalyptus, mulberry trees, and fish ponds, and a deserted granite quarry just across the road.

Then people started dying. First the grandpa we lived with. Then the other, who had a small ranch and horses. Then the great grandma who lived with the evil grandma. Then the evil grandma’s brother, whom she tormented. Without him to torment, she soon died. Next came uncle Fenton, our neighbor, of cancer at age 50, and aunt Mary, younger still, after having spent the previous couple years with rags where her breast used to be. Then Eddie, Mary's husband, a health food and exercise addict, of a heart attack before age 50.

Then came my dad. And only months after my dad died, my mother got stricken with spinal meningitis. The night I got her to the hospital, a doctor gave her a 50/50 chance. But she pulled through. I thought all the dying was over, and at first, my best friend Eric agreed.

He lived with me while my mom was in the hospital. And he proved we were wrong, when he died. But that's another story.

So I suppose all this death and insecurity got me to dreaming about what it could mean to have a family who could care for and teach and support each other. That, I believe, is what Tom Hickey craved above all else, having come from a missing father and an evil mother. And what he wanted is what he got, after a few wrong turns.