IF YOU HAD A FAMILY
Published under the name Barbara Wilson
Seal Press, 1996
ISBN-10: 1878067257
ISBN-13: 978-1878067258

From Booklist:
Wilson's new novel is a meditation on the ties that bind, on the concept of, for lack of a better term, family. Southern California in the 1950s, beautifully evoked with its wildly colored flowers and apricot trees, is Midwesterner Polly Winter's new home. She wants to cast off the strictures of her rigid Christian Scientist background and provide warmth and joy to her small daughter, Cory, and tiny son, Kevin. This dream shatters when, having postponed medical examination of a breast lump, she dies of cancer, leaving the children to their father, an emotionally absent orphan who creates a new category of orphanhood for bereaved Cory. After enduring repressed childhood memories and trauma for a quarter century, Cory must deal with the pain of her past as she struggles to make her relationship with Rosemary work. Wilson writes thoughtfully and tenderly, with obvious affection for the pieces of her characters' personalities that stubbornly don't quite fit into the picture of a problemless life.

From Express Books:
In this, her best novel, Barbara Wilson rips away life's masks to find not grimness or angst, but an elegant pastiche of color and swell and touch and landscape, rendered through the sometimes hazy, sometimes sharp screen of memory….Memory comes filtering back as she starts to paint. It's a perfect structure because it mirrors Cory's soul—the way she touches life and ultimately herself is with color and light, and she will end up remembering everything through those prisms. Which makes for gorgeous wordplay; some sections I wanted to dip up with a spoon and whirl around in my mouth. The emotional truths work as well—that Cory's orphaned father meets his wife's death with hopeless acquiescence, and that Cory's mother's death is far more the story here than her uncle's betrayal. Wilson manages to pull off an astonishing sleight of hand; she writes of pain and loss in such beautiful and evocative language that we would go through it all again, just to see the sun on the grass.

From The Lesbian Review of Books:
A common saga, If You Had a Family is nonetheless, in the telling, an uncommon novel. Wilson has captured the tone of the '50s, the oppressing weight of growing up under critical eyes, the conflicting emotion of struggling with abuse and sexual identity, and the difficulty of coming to terms with the early loss of a parent….The resolution, when it comes, is both satisfying and partial, as real life is all too apt to be. Wilson has done a remarkable job of capturing a realness in life that is both painful and beautiful.