The Family Snitch - by Francesca Fontana (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A Wall Street Journal reporter confronts the most difficult source she's ever encountered, her own father, in this unsparing interrogation of the ways we deceive ourselves and others

A stunning debut, perfect for fans of searing family memoirs that lift the veil of childhood, as in books by Nicole Chung and Ashley C. Ford

Francesca's parents represented opposing world-views. Her mother always slid her way out of questions about the past, saying only "My life started when you were born." Her dad, an absent bodybuilder, loved telling stories about his seemingly larger-than-life past. He said he would tell her anything she wanted to know. But more often than not, it was a total lie. When Francesa was 9, he went to prison, and her mother, the grounding center of Francesca's world, moved her half a continent away...

The first in her family to attend college, The Family Snitch started as a youthful experiment in journalistic investigation, as Francesca began to uncover her father's secret criminal past. But in her increasingly dogged pursuit of the truth at any cost, was she just selling everybody out?

In her thought-provoking exploration, Francesca also interrogates her own relationship to the truth, finding that she trusts almost no one and refuses to believe anything that can't be backed by hard evidence. She turns to experts on memory and psychology, in search of someone to help explain the secrets kept between parents and children, and the inheritances they leave us in the fallout of their choices. She pulls on the threads that lead her back through the forms that came before this one: theater and film, Greek tragedy and myth.

The result is a page-turning memoir that is also an artful work of literature with enduring appeal.

Review Quotes

"A heart-rending documentation of the corrosive nature of shame and the limitations of truth. With surgical precision and scrupulous reportage, Fontana examines what love takes--in action, not intention--demanding a clear accounting of the past, and letting no one, herself included, off the hook." --Nina St. Pierre, author of Love Is a Burning Thing

"Unflinching yet vulnerable, The Family Snitch is the riveting investigation of an elusive father, the truth behind his time in and out of prison, and the inescapable reverberations of childhood into the present. Fontana writes about herself and the people whose lives shaped hers with deep clarity and sometimes heartbreaking frankness. This book is the best kind of memoir -- one that resists easy answers, choosing instead to remind us of the impossibly complex nature of humanity." -- Vanessa A. Bee, author of Home Bound

"What Francesca Fontana achieves is miraculous. She is not only an extraordinary reporter of her father's criminal past but also of her own self--the ways she is shaped by her history and the tremendous courage it takes to break free. The Family Snitch begins as an inquiry into the possibilities, trickery, and bounds of memory, and unfolds into a devastating story of heartbreak within one family." -- Sanaë Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair

"Francesca Fontana's The Family Snitch: A Daughter's Memoir of Truth and Lies is a sharp and absorbing investigation into a father, a mother, and a self. By mapping hard facts onto the slippery and abstract, Fontana reveals the futilities of trying to pin down a lie, of attempting to measure the emotionally-outsized proportions of a parent." -- Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, author of Holding

"Superb! A relentless, true-crime memoir about a reporter investigating the hardest possible subject: her own outlaw father." -- PJ Vogt, journalist and host of Search Engine podcast

"Through incredible investigative storytelling, Francesca Fontana's The Family Snitch: A Daughter's Memoir of Truth and Lies is a stirring examination of truth, deception, and self. Told with precision and vulnerability, Fontana's memoir is both moving and endlessly thought-provoking about stories that shape one's life, and how we live with them." --Rainesford Stauffer, author of An Ordinary Age and All the Gold Stars

"Fontana's voice is clear, singular and full of sorely needed truth, and the complex personal story she weaves together in The Family Snitch is engrossing and empathetic in equal measure."
--Emma Specter, author of More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for "Enough"

About the Author

Francesca Fontana is an award-winning reporter at the Wall Street Journal. She is a graduate of the University of Oregon's Clark Honors College. In 2020, she received a Front Page Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Jiji.