Children often don’t understand who their parents were before they came along. Parenting changes a person. Finding out who they were is hard enough when they are still alive. In the case of the twin siblings in Rebecca Fallon’s debut, Family Drama, their mother is dead, and they want to answer the question even their mother didn’t fully know: who was Susan Bliss?
Susan works as an actress and lands a role in a popular soap opera filmed in California. She’s fallen in love with Alcott (Al), a tenure-track professor based in Boston. The couple balances their bicoastal marriage and their professional aspirations while raising two children, Sebastian and Viola. Susan dies when the twins are young children, and so they never knew her well. As they become young adults, Sebastian sets himself on a quest to learn about his mother. Viola accidentally ends up dragged along on the journey when she begins dating Orson, an actor who worked alongside their mother years earlier. The story is told over the course of two competing timelines, the first chronologically beginning in the 1980s at the onset of Susan’s career and relationship with Al, and a second beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the 2000s focusing on Sebastian and Viola’s journey. A third era appears from time to time to, as Susan is diagnosed with cancer and prepares for her death. The narrative largely alternates between the two eras, which feel as though they are often in conversation with each other, with the past informing the present moment.
The narrative is slow to start. Eventually, though, Fallon creates a complex set of questions for the twins to seek answers to, mostly involving Susan’s secretive life in California. Their aunt, Susan’s sister Sadie, is a catalyst helping fan the flames of controversy. Al kept the twins at a distance from her following Susan’s premature death, and as they grow into adults, she tempts them with secrets. She offers her archive of VHS recordings of Susan’s television show, for instance. However, Al throws them away without watching them, and without telling his children about them.
Once the story is set up, the conflicts build enough momentum to sustain the narrative. Sebastian’s obsession with finding out the truth of his mother’s past life drives a wedge between him and his father as well as him and Viola, and ultimately fuels his artwork. His successful career as an artist is a kind of backdrop to the 2000s era in the novel, but his ascent as a working artist and his career are not deeply explored. Viola eventually takes on much of the narrative burden when she meets Orson, whom we also see in the 1980s alongside her mother. When they sleep together, the questions raised by Sebastian, like whether Orson slept with their mother, become even more complicated.
At the heart of Susan’s story is the desire to have it all. She wants her career, but she also does love Al, and she wants to balance all of this with motherhood. Al, whose tenured job keeps him tethered to Boston, becomes an obstacle to Susan’s career. In Boston she can’t pursue auditions. On weekends, she ends up commuting between Los Angeles and Boston, and not only does this ongoing travel wear her thin, it also prevents her from more auditions. Adding the birth of the twins layers another challenge onto her desire to follow her career. What Fallon has successfully highlighted is the conflict any ambitious creative person feels when it comes to raising a family. Often those ambitions are incompatible, and a sacrifice of one or the other is necessary.
Susan’s challenges aren’t helped by Al, who is stubborn and uncompromising. He won’t give up his university position to live in California with Susan, and Fallon is unsympathetic to Al’s plight. His tenure-track job serves as an excuse to alienate Susan. What we never really see is how the academic community is punishing and restrictive, and all the awful ways the ambition for a tenured academic job forces compromises and often encourages neglecting family. Those concerns aren’t explored at all in the novel, and instead, Al comes across as simply a problematic husband who refuses to support his wife. The result is, for the reader, little to redeem Al. He’s merely this obstacle that works against Susan. To his credit, he too clearly has his own internal conflict between his career ambition and his love of Susan and desire for a family; we simply don’t see why he can’t be more accommodating.
We also aren’t shown similar conflict with the twins, who throughout the novel are young and just beginning their life journey. Sebastian struggles academically, but excels in the creative arts. He finds success, seemingly without much struggle, creating collage and photographic art. While his career is a B-plot in the novel, not exploring the details seems a missed opportunity when so much of his mother’s story is literally about balancing an acting career with having a family. In Viola’s case, she attends university and is academically successful but without showing much intent or purpose. Her trajectory feels genuine, a young adult carried by the whims of the breeze. But she never confronts the question of what she is doing with her life.
Braiding together the chronologies creates plenty of opportunity to reflect on the parallels between generations and explore the concerns of a balanced life, of ambition and desire. That doesn’t always happen in a fulfilling way. Perhaps it feels unsatisfactory because Susan’s life isn’t as sordid as her children suppose, and the big secrets they uncover aren’t that big or salacious. There’s a lot of drama built up around the person who Susan was, creating a need for the twins to unearth those secrets, but ultimately she turns out to be ordinary, simply struggling to find the balance that so many people want.
Family Drama is an exploration of how a person can have competing desires and the damage serving more than one ambition can create. Fallon has found a compelling way to tell that story, and as the novel progresses, so does the reader’s longing for an answer. The disheartening reality is that we can’t have it all, and Family Drama is a reminder of the sacrifices people make for their children.
FICTION
Family Drama
By Rebecca Fallon
Simon & Schuster
Published February 3, 2026
