What if forgiveness were unthinkable?

Is there anything more maddening, perplexing, and utterly inscrutable than a family, even the one closest to us?

Paul Kahn’s unique and brave book probes the intimate, perplexing, and painful mystery of his own family. Above all, the book is an unparalleled exercise in paying attention. If, as Simone Weil said, attention is love, then Kahn loves his parents deeply. Kahn, a political philosopher at Yale, undertakes an almost phenomenological dissection of his mother and father’s lifelong marriage—although “marriage” here seems like a generous description for what is more of a tortured entanglement than a relationship.

Testimony begins with an Angela Lansbury-grade mystery: “On my mother’s seventy-fifth birthday, she began to confess. By her eightieth birthday, she was dead.” The confession? An adulterous affair, years ago.