The Wrong Family

Content Warning: This section of the guide references mental illness, substance use disorders, sexual misconduct, and kidnapping.

Winnie Crouch expends great effort to cause her family and home to appear perfect to all her friends and neighbors. Her obsession ranges from “fixing” a working doorbell so that its chime will sound more pleasant to insisting that the family eat vegetarian. She selected the house on Turlin Street without consulting Nigel because she wanted to create an impression for her friends: “And, most importantly, her friends were jealous. A house on Greenlake! Why, that’s almost as good as a house on Lake Washington! They’d all said so, which had brought a deep flush of pleasure to Winnie” (30). Most tellingly, it emerges that she at one point kidnapped a child to fulfill her idea of the perfect family. Winnie struggled to become pregnant but saw becoming mother as an integral part of the life she had planned for herself, so she took the baby of an unhoused teenage mother, Josalyn.

Winnie’s crime reveals the hollowness of the upper-middle-class family life to which Winnie aspires. The Wrong Family takes place in a well-to-do neighborhood where there is great pressure to conform to a particular public image.