Running in the Family (memoir)

Running in the Family is a fictionalized memoir, written in post-modern style involving aspects of magic realism, by Michael Ondaatje.

It deals with his return to his native island of Sri Lanka, also called Ceylon, in the late 1970s.

Much of the focus falls on his father Mervyn Ondaatje and his scandalous drunken antics.

The book often seems to blur the lines of fiction and history by offering diverse accounts of certain incidents and retellings of isolated events about which the author couldn't logically know so many intimate details.

History becomes anecdote, the past that is remembered: recollected and recounted, a negotiation with memory and its unreliability.