All Families Are Psychotic is the seventh novel by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob and...

, published in 2001. The novel is the fictional story of the dysfunctional Drummond family and their adventures on a trip to see their daughter's space shuttle launch.

Plot

The novel is the tale of the Drummond family from Vancouver gathering together to watch Sarah Drummond's rocket blast off at the Kennedy Center. The Drummonds are a group of misfits with a wide array of personal foibles and intricacies. The novel's plot is the tale of events that reunite the Drummond family after many years of estrangement.

Several plot points of the book include geriatric HIV

HIV

Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...

, armed robbery, death in Walt Disney World, pharmaceutical drug lords, black market baby sales, Daytona Beach, and suicide attempts.

Early in the book the men of the family travel to nearby Walt Disney World where they receive a package destined for the Bahamas containing a letter written by Prince William stolen from Princess Diana's casket. The men start to travel to the Bahamas to deliver their package, but everything and anything happens to them on the way.

The novel is told in a similar style to Miss Wyoming

Miss Wyoming (novel)

Miss Wyoming is a novel by Douglas Coupland. It was first published by Random House of Canada in January 2000.The novel follows two protagonists, Susan Colgate, a former Miss Wyoming, and John Johnson, a former action film producer. Both have experienced early success but now find themselves in...

, with many plot flashbacks. However, the focus in this novel is on the temporally linear plot.

Characters

Wade Drummond

Eldest child and first son of Ted and Janet Drummond, Wade ran away from home at the age of 17 after a particularly violent encounter with his father, and proceeded to, for the next thirty or so years, wander across North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 drifting from one job to the next in search of the next cheap thrill. As a result of his various encounters, Wade has contracted AIDS

AIDS

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...

, and has decided to settle down, eventually marrying Beth, a woman whom he met at an STD

Sexually transmitted disease

Sexually transmitted disease , also known as a sexually transmitted infection or venereal disease , is an illness that has a significant probability of transmission between humans by means of human sexual behavior, including vaginal intercourse, oral sex, and anal sex...

 support group. Wade rarely takes things seriously, and often teases his various family members, most notably his father Ted and brother Bryan.

Ted Drummond

Patriarch

Patriarch

Originally a patriarch was a man who exercised autocratic authority as a pater familias over an extended family. The system of such rule of families by senior males is called patriarchy. This is a Greek word, a compound of πατριά , "lineage, descent", esp...

 of the Drummond family and generally abusive father, Ted resented his sons, Bryan and Wade, and doted on his daughter Sarah throughout most of their respective childhoods. After separating from his first wife Janet, Ted married Nikki, a trophy wife, who, for some reason, cares deeply for him. An alcoholic, Ted can be at times charming and likable, and at others, abrasive and violent.

Janet Drummond

Matriarch of the Drummond family, and Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

 native, Janet married her husband Ted straight out of college, and, as a result, has trouble filling her days following their separation. A caring mother, Janet is deeply concerned for the well-being of her children, and often checks up on them to make sure they are alright. Janet is in her mid 60's and trying to find herself.

Bryan Drummond

The eternally depressed youngest child of Ted and Janet, Bryan has three times tried to kill himself. Finding solace in the wings of political activists and protesters, Bryan lacks focus and drifts aimlessly from cause to cause. Bryan is always the last in a room to get a joke, and has a penchant for the melodramatic. His girlfriend, also an activist, goes by the name Shw.

Sarah Drummond

The only daughter and middle child of Ted and Janet, Sarah is, without a doubt, the best-adjusted member of the Drummond family. Pursuing a career in aeronautics, Sarah became an astronaut

Astronaut

An astronaut or cosmonaut is a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft....

, and is the reason for the family's reunion in Florida

Florida

Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

. Sarah has only one hand, the result of a birth defect, caused by her mother's use of thalidomide

Thalidomide

Thalidomide was introduced as a sedative drug in the late 1950s that was typically used to cure morning sickness. In 1961, it was withdrawn due to teratogenicity and neuropathy. There is now a growing clinical interest in thalidomide, and it is introduced as an immunomodulatory agent used...

 while she was carrying Sarah. Always worried for her brothers, Sarah is always the first to know if anything is wrong with either Bryan or Wade, and is the only one able to get them to talk about it. Sarah is married to Howie, an unemployed "astronaut's husband" who is severely disliked by the rest of the family.

Nickie Drummond

Ted Drummond's second wife, Nickie used to work for Mr. Drummond. Definitely at odds with Janet, they later bond over a shared medical condition. Nickie accidentally sleeps with Wade at an airport without knowing that he is legally her stepson. The realization of this encounters step incestuous nature by Ted causes a very large incident to occur.

Shw

Bryan's girlfriend, Shw is the child of very hippie parents. They allowed her to choose a new name at 16, in which Shw chose Shw. Her real name is a mystery for most of the novel. Shw stands for Sogetsu Hernando Watanabe, a martyred hero of the Peruvian Shining Path

Shining Path

Shining Path is a Maoist guerrilla terrorist organization in Peru. The group never refers to itself as "Shining Path", and as several other Peruvian groups, prefers to be called the "Communist Party of Peru" or "PCP-SL" in short...

 terrorist faction. She is pregnant with Bryan's child, and has ulterior motives in the birth of the child. She has told Bryan she wants to abort the child, but this is a mask for her real intentions.

Beth Drummond

Beth is Wade's wife. She is a very religious person, a foil to Wade's crazy attitude with life. However, it seems that her religious nature may be affecting Wade's personality. She is pregnant with Wade's child, after a procedure in Europe allows her to become pregnant without becoming HIV positive.

Inspiration

The trigger for the book was Coupland's mother's discovery of the Internet, mirrored by Janet's discovery of the Internet in the text.
In Coupland's 1995 novel Microserfs

Microserfs

Microserfs, published by HarperCollins in 1995, is an epistolary novel by Douglas Coupland. It first appeared in short story form as the cover article for the January 1994 issue of Wired magazine and was subsequently expanded to full novel length...

, the narrator says about his girlfriend: "All she'll say is they are psychotic, as if everybody else's family isn't."

History

The novel is one of Coupland's more popular. In its initial publication run, it was printed in two halves, glued back to back, so that one cover was upside down. The reader was forced, halfway through the novel, to turn the book upside down to continue reading. This quirk was eliminated on subsequent print runs, but the cover still retained this peculiar arrangement in some later printings.

The original British cover, which featured a woman in a rocket ship, caused Coupland some grief, as "it misportrays the book's contents and sort of . . . sends the wrong message out". The original Canadian and American covers featured a Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan was an American photographer. His work was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as multiple grants from the NEA...

 photograph of an older woman staring out a window through curtains.

In 2006, DreamWorks

DreamWorks

DreamWorks Pictures, also known as DreamWorks, LLC, DreamWorks SKG, DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC, DreamWorks Studios or DW Studios, LLC, is an American film studio which develops, produces, and distributes films, video games and television programming...

announced that a film version of All Families Are Psychotic would be released 2006 or 2007. The project remains in development. Writer Mark Poirier has been commissioned to adapt the screenplay from Coupland's novel.