Ten years after going no contact with his parents, the narrator of Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary understands the rupture as an act of liberation. The intervening decade has been the happiest of his life. And Bajani, winner of Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize, gives us ample reason to see why.
Few readers will finish the novel wondering why the son left. The father is controlling, even tyrannical, and at times physically violent. The mother has been so diminished by decades of accommodating her husband that she seems to almost occupy no space in her son’s memory. Yet much of the novel is devoted to the complicated ways she participates in her diminishment and the consequences of that participation for her children.
Bajani is an elegant writer. His restraint sits in tension with the extremity of his subject: the domineering patriarch, the self-effacing wife, the children whose liberation requires escape. The prose resists caricature even as the family seems schematic. But the schematic quality seems in part to be the point. We never learn the characters’ names. They are simply the father, the mother, the son, and the sister. This invites us to see them as archetypes—as everyone’s parents. The particular family stands for the institution of the family, and its pathology for something pathological in that institution.
The novel arrives as a cultural wave is cresting. An estimated 68 million Americans are estranged from at least one family member, according to Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer’s research. For years, the idea of going no contact has been gaining momentum in therapeutic culture and on social media. Bajani’s novel and the discussion surrounding it give literary expression to a view of estrangement long incubating there: the family is a social structure imposed upon us, and its unchosen obligations are constraints we should eventually evolve beyond.
The power of the extreme case is that it can become archetypal. Once the pathological family becomes the representative family, it creates a lens through which much more ordinary families come to understand themselves.
Bajani’s novel and the discussion surrounding it give literary expression to a view of estrangement long incubating there: the family is a social structure imposed upon us, and its unchosen obligations are constraints we should eventually evolve beyond.
This movement from the extreme case to the universal one is part of a phenomenon I call “trauma hijacking” in my book, No Contact (Forum, 2026). Genuine trauma carries an understandable moral authority. An adult child of abusive parents, for example, has an inarguable reason to break ties. But that moral authority can be borrowed by far less extreme cases, until the remedy appropriate to abuse begins to seem appropriate to ordinary conflict.
You can see this process in popular treatments of estrangement. For example, a Cosmopolitan article earlier this year about the rise of “toxic families” places the story of a woman who stopped speaking to her father over disagreements about religion and politics alongside estrangements involving a father’s heroin addiction and another involving an abusive mother.
Such conflations distort the reality of the situation in both directions. Ordinary family conflict is catastrophized, while genuinely traumatic experiences are diminished by being placed on the same continuum. As the distinction between the dysfunctional and the ordinary collapses, dysfunction begins to appear as a defining condition of family life. The distinction matters: an abusive family is a corruption of family, not a revelation of what family secretly is.
Yet the rhetoric surrounding The Anniversary repeatedly makes this same leap. Jhumpa Lahiri praises Bajani on the book’s cover for confronting “the tyranny of memory” and “the totalitarianism of family.” In a recent interview, Bajani described the family in Italy as “kind of an institution that comes before the state,” before calling families “these little totalitarian systems.”
But there is nothing peculiar or sinister in the idea that the family is pre-political. Political authority doesn’t create the bond between parent and child, nor the obligations that arise from it. Indeed, it was precisely this pre-political character that gave the family some protection against the abuse of political power. Totalitarianism meant, among other things, the state’s attempt to subordinate the loyalties and institutions standing between itself and the individual.
How, then, did the institution that precedes politics come to look like a miniature version of political oppression? Part of the answer lies in the strange affinity between two apparent opposites: radical individualism and totalizing political power. The family, like the Church, stands as a barrier to both. It places between the individual and the state a network of loyalties, obligations, care, and authority that political power neither creates nor fully controls. When those bonds weaken, the individual doesn’t simply become more independent; needs once answered within them remain and increasingly must be met by the market or the state.
But the family also limits the sovereignty of the self. We enter the world—and often leave it—in a condition of existential poverty, dependent on others for things we can’t provide ourselves. The natural institution of the family is uniquely suited to answer that dependence personally, encountering us as named and known.
This helps explain why radical individualism and totalizing political power are mutually reinforcing. As the bonds between people weaken, fewer loyalties and institutions stand between the individual and political power; as political power absorbs more of the functions once performed by those institutions, those bonds weaken further.
Family frustrates both tendencies by revealing that neither the individual nor the state is sovereign over the whole of human life. Some relationships and the obligations they carry precede them both.
Indeed, Bajani’s abusive father inadvertently demonstrates the point. We can call him a bad father only because fatherhood contains obligations he has failed to fulfill. His domination is a corruption of paternal authority, not evidence that paternal authority is authoritarianism. A norm can be violated without being invalidated. Familial obligations aren’t absolute, but neither are they invented. The pathological family can teach us when we need to leave a family, but it can’t—and shouldn’t—redefine it.