House Rules

House Rules by Rachel Sontag is a 2008 autobiographical work, in which the author writes about growing up in suburbia with a father who was a widely respected doctor, much admired by the medical students he teaches. He never physically or sexually abuses his daughter but his mental illness, kept hidden from the world, leads him to cause her much psychological pain. Outwardly, Sontag is a member of a typical family. Her father is a good provider, the family goes on vacations, and she and her sister Jenny do well in school. Rachel is close to her father and thrives on his approval.

Inside the family home, Dr. Sontag has a different persona. He is no longer the charming pillar of the community, but rather an emotionally abusive bully who needs to be in control of everything around him. He controls even the smallest details of his family’s life. At times, when Rachel challenges his authority, he verbally abuses her and makes her write letters of apology. He has a very specific system of household tasks that must be adhered to. Whether her father was controlling to the point of being abusive or just an overly strict parent trying to deal with two teenage daughters is perhaps open to debate.

Sontag tells of her father leaving her to wait in the family garage one evening when she returned home having lost her key to the house. After she stops banging on the door and time goes by, he lets her in for dinner. He tells her that she will probably never lose her key again. She also shares that he would secure the dial of the radios in the house to always be tuned to NPR. These events are somewhat innocuous in comparison to other details that unfold in the book, and unquestionably show that he was more than just a strict parent. He controls the length at which his daughters’ hair and nails must be maintained. He records his daughters’ telephone calls, along with conversations among family members. At one point, he tells Rachel that he wishes she was never born. Further, Dr. Sontag prescribes lithium for Rachel’s mother, Ellen, so that he can keep her in a pliable state, so that he is able to control her. When it gets to the point that their mother is almost catatonic, Rachel and Jenny begin taunting her, although their mother seems unaware of their cruelty. What led them to treat her this way is never explained.



At one point, Rachel is taken from her home and sent for a short while to a facility for abused or neglected girls called The Harbor. She does not give a lot of information about this experience. Implicit in the descriptions she gives of her father is that he was quite likely suffering from a type of depression that led to his disruptive behavior with respect to family relationships. Sontag does not have a clear idea herself what her father suffered from, “Perhaps he was a sociopath. Perhaps he was bipolar. Perhaps if he'd gotten help twenty years ago, things would have been different.” Sontag’s story is one of a love-hate relationship between her and her father.

Rachel recognizes that her father was a complicated and conflicted person. The story remains in some ways superficial as it never fully grapples her father's inner struggles or why, after breaking ties with him, the author still connects with him so strongly. Additionally, she does not offer any real insight into the role her mother played in their family dynamic or her relationship with Rachel's father. Rachel reveals her fear of becoming more like her mother and, in striving to avoid that fate, becomes more like her father.

Kirkus Reviews recognizes that the book may not dig deeply enough into the roots and dynamics of the actions of Rachel’s father. “Sontag presents this as a book on family dynamics, but its scope is actually much narrower. She focuses primarily on the controlling behavior of her father, a physician in a VA hospital who set and enforced his own unreasonable rules for what the author, her mother and sometimes her younger sister could and could not say and do. His wife, a school social worker, was singularly unable or unwilling to protect her daughters or herself from his bizarre strictures and harsh, tormenting harangues. In Sontag’s sharply reconstructed scenes, her father comes across as a name-calling monster, her mother as a cringing wimp…When the author finally left home, her struggle to become independent became arduous. Family relations were strained, lies seemed necessary, apologies and reconciliations were not forthcoming. In the final chapters, almost as an afterthought, Sontag briefly explores her relationship with her younger sister, whom their father tended to ignore as they were growing up.”