THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies, by Francesca Fontana
As a junior at the University of Oregon, Francesca Fontana had a journalism professor who taught students how to use the federal court record database. After class, in the privacy of his office, she asked her professor’s help looking up a Chicago case of particular interest to her: USA v. Fontana, from 2001. That moment of discovery proved the beginning of a multistep research project into her father, Al, and his intermittent criminal history, and culminated a decade later in her new memoir, “The Family Snitch.”
As the title suggests, Fontana, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, remains ambivalent about the morality of making public her family’s dirty laundry. (My own preferred memoirist’s justification, which usually gets a laugh from students, is Anne Lamott’s: “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”)
In 2019, Fontana went through a dry run when The Journal published her feature “My Father, His Crime, and My Search for the True Story.” That piece’s tone is wry but accepting, as Fontana reports dispassionately on the aftermath of the crime that put her father behind bars; the memoir is more layered and complex — and, paradoxically, more raw.
At age 9, Francesca was aware that her father had “gone away” for a period, but it was a while before she understood that he was in prison. She still visited with her dad’s Italian and Mexican relatives in Chicago, but was “always the last to know” their darker stories. When she moved to Oregon with her mother’s second husband and her baby brother, Francesca wrote to her dad in jail; these letters are among many family documents Fontana pored over to reconstruct her parents’ brief marriage, and what followed for her father (including the birth of two subsequent children, by different women).
Al’s crime is not the main source of fascination for either author or reader, although Fontana repeatedly goes over the episode, sometimes in her father’s telling, sometimes her own. Al Fontana was the newest member of a team that included two policemen, all of whom posed as law enforcement, then broke into drug dealers’ homes and made off with the cash and drugs they found. His bad luck was to join in on the night of the F.B.I.’s successful sting operation.
Francesca Fontana takes time to canvas Chicago’s extensive history of police corruption, and interviews lawyers who represented the four men. As one mob attorney says equably to her, “A lot of good people do stupid things” (a line Fontana doesn’t buy — or, not enough to exonerate her dad). Another defense attorney, tight-lipped in response to her questions, bluntly poses his own: “What are you trying to do?” he demands. “What, you wanna be the family snitch?”
Not exactly. Fontana’s goal is, rather, to recount the tortuous turns in her relationship with her father, using a range of forms: fictional re-creations of scenes from her childhood; disquisitions on Greek mythology, framing her narrative as a film or stage production; and deep, affecting explorations of mental health issues, her own and her former husband’s. Fontana, always meticulous, describes her ongoing challenges with obsessive-compulsive disorder (including some graphic descriptions of self-harm), but is at her most animated when outlining what it is to be a narcissist and a pathological liar — two things she considers her father to be.
Fontana’s overarching concern is the nature of memory and truth-telling. “I reached for veracity, in my compulsive need to know. I wanted to find an honest father, an end to the lies, an absolute truth.” But over and over she is disappointed. It is clear from her own and others’ experiences that the man was a great raconteur: “When he was telling a story, something came to life in Al.” Unfortunately, this aspect of her father, or the charm of it, does not fully enter the narrative; it is dimmed by the stronger sense of Fontana’s anger.
Two-thirds into this engrossing memoir, it is clear that the cool, clinical Fontana will not make this a story of reconciliation. “I didn’t think we owed anyone forgiveness,” she writes about various men in her past who attempt to make amends to her — including Al — in the wake of her Journal piece. “I still don’t.”
But these exchanges, which include multiple phone calls and much self-recrimination on her father’s part, don’t allow any real change in their dynamic, and what Fontana considers the “playacting” of “familial normalcy.” Toward the book’s end, Fontana turns instead to the deep and sustaining love between herself and her mother, and this affords the book a softer landing, honoring and celebrating that one foundational, reliable relationship of her life.
THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies | By Francesca Fontana | Steerforth | 278 pp. | Paperback, $19.95
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