by ELISE BRISCO
Discovering you have more siblings than you can count on both hands might seem like the climactic moment of a memoir – but for Chrysta Bilton, that’s not the case.
Bilton doesn’t address this revelation in her life until nearly 200 pages into her vulnerable and omniscient “Normal Family: On Truth, Love and How I Met My 35 Siblings” (Little, Brown and Co., 288 pp., out now), but the first three-fourths of her story is still a page turner. “Normal Family” catalogs her life from the time her mom convinced a stranger into commissioned fatherhood to the present day as Bilton, 37, has started her own contrastingly nuclear family of four in Los Angeles.
The title – “meant to be ironic,” says Bilton – speaks to the understanding that family is built on connection and love, not normalcy, because “every family has its quirks and eccentricities.”
Bilton’s “normal family” began as her mom, Debra, yearned deeply for motherhood – a seemingly impossible goal for a lesbian in the 1980s. Her desire to be a mom led her to offer a handsome stranger, whom she’d met in a hair salon, $2,000 in exchange for a cup of his semen. This stranger was Bilton’s dad, Jeffrey. After giving Debra his DNA for two successful pregnancies, his participation expanded to a lifetime commitment of birthday and holiday appearances at Debra’s request (and payment) so her daughters would feel “normal” while growing up on the West Coast.
“I didn’t realize my family was unusual as a kid. I just thought that this was my life,” Bilton says as her parent’s relationship was never clear to her. She was told her dad was “traveling” or “working” when he disappeared for months at a time and popped back in. Once she reached adolescence, things got more “complex,” Bilton says, as she became self-conscious of her mom’s sexuality and overheard her dad be called a “drug addict.”
“I started realizing how unconventional my family was,” Bilton says.
Debra’s efforts to create an illusion of normalcy for Bilton and her younger sister were to no avail. Much of theirlives consisted of moving in and out of the homes of her mom’s lovers, keeping up appearances while attending an unaffordable private school and walking into their mom’s rehab intervention while Bilton faced issues with substance abuse herself as a teen. Bilton spent much of her youth embarrassed.
After graduating from Barnard College in the late 2000s, Bilton found out she had more siblings than just her younger sister Kaitlyn.
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