DigDig

This is a surreal and searing dive into the tangled secrets of a wealthy white family in suburban Pennsylvania and the terrible cost the family's children pay to maintain the family name. Only a generation removed from being Pennsylvania potato farmers, property developers Gottfried and Marla Hemmings now sit atop a seven-figure bank account - wealth they've declined to pass on to their adult children or teenage grandchildren. 'Because we want them to thrive,' Marla always says. What does thriving look like? Like carrying a snow shovel everywhere. Like selling pot from a fast-food drive-thru window. Like a first-class ticket to Jamaica between cancer treatments. Like a flea circus in a trailer. Like the GPS coordinates to a mound of dirt in a New Jersey forest. As the rot beneath the surface of the Hemmings' suburban respectability begins to spread, the far-flung grandchildren gradually find their ways back to one another, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name. With her inimitable surrealism and insight into the teenage experience, the author explores how a corrosive culture of polite, affluent white supremacy tears a family apart and how one determined generation can save themselves.