All Families Are Psychotic
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| Author | Douglas Coupland |
|---|---|
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Random House of Canada (Canada), Bloomsbury (UK) |
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Publication date
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2001 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback, Paperback) |
| Pages | 279 pp (Fortieth anniversary edition) |
| ISBN | (first edition, hardback) |
| OCLC | 46702989 |
| Preceded by | Miss Wyoming |
| Followed by | Hey Nostradamus! |
All Families Are Psychotic is the seventh novel by Douglas Coupland, published in 2001. The novel is the fictional story of the dysfunctional Drummond family and their adventures on a trip to see their daughter's space shuttle launch.
The novel is the tale of the Drummond family from Vancouver gathering together to watch Sarah Drummond's space shuttle blast off at the Kennedy Space Center. The Drummonds are a group of misfits with a wide array of personal foibles and intricacies. The novel's plot is the tale of events that reunite the Drummond family after many years of estrangement.
Several plot points of the book include geriatric HIV, armed robbery, death in Walt Disney World, pharmaceutical drug lords, black market baby sales, Daytona Beach, and suicide attempts.
Early in the book the men of the family travel to nearby Walt Disney World where they receive a package destined for the Bahamas containing a letter written by Prince William stolen from Princess Diana's casket. The men start to travel to the Bahamas to deliver their package, but everything and anything happens to them on the way.
The novel is told in a similar style to Miss Wyoming, with many plot flashbacks. However, the focus in this novel is on the temporally linear plot.
The trigger for the book was Coupland's mother's discovery of the Internet, mirrored by Janet's discovery of the Internet in the text.
"My mother discovered the internet about two years ago. She's got this really weird medical condition which only 150 people on the planet have and she's managed to get them all together. It's transformed her as a person, she got rid of all her old friends – they're boring, they don't care about what's happening – chucked out all her clothes, shops only Banana Republic and Gap now. She's always been an interesting person but now she's interested in the world again. Watching that transformation, obviously, is the trigger for this book."
In Coupland's 1995 novel Microserfs, the narrator says about his girlfriend: "All she'll say is they are psychotic, as if everybody else's family isn't."
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Wikipedia