How to Kill Your Family: a dip into revenge murders and misogyny

Bella Mackie holds a mirror up to the modern feminist with her darkly satirical novel How to Kill Your Family

Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Besides being an eye-catching title on your morning commute, this gripping story navigates the uncomfortable topics of misogyny, socioeconomic inequality, and of course strained familial relationships. Much like other tales told from the perspective of a murderer on a mission (Dexter immediately comes to mind), the audience may at times find themselves sympathising with the antiheroine and her tragic backstory, though she herself hardly cries about it.

Our main character, Grace Bernard, is a stoic young woman with two main goals: revenge and acquiring the family fortune. Painted rather more as a sociopathic schemer than a psychopathic killer, she comes across as just your average Jane: flat in south London, job in marketing, goes shopping, and attends parties. Nothing remarkable about her life... on the surface.

As we learn more about Grace's childhood and her heritage, we are taken on a ride-along while she orchestrates the murders of several estranged family members, seemingly with no regrets. She justifies her lethal acts by sharing with us details of her victims' extravagant and disparaging lifestyles. As members of the upper class, these people are shown to be despicable, making it easier to dismiss their deaths as a mercy to society.

Spotify audiobook cover art (artist unknown)

At times, the first person narrative perspective makes it difficult to separate our main character from the author, further immersing the reader in Grace's life. This is emphasised as it's revealed that the story we're reading is actually Grace's autobiography. Mackie's composition results in Grace being our main character, our narrator, and - we eventually discover - our author.

As I am a slow and easily distracted reader, I find the experience more immersive when I follow along with an audiobook. Spotify has a well-paced rendition narrated by Charly Clive and Paul Panting, and the cover art (above) is a colourful nod to chapter five, which was particularly conflicting — you'll see why.

In summary, How to Kill Your Family puts a spotlight on the insidious behaviour of the extremely wealthy class with its sly commentary on their self-centred, performative nature. Ultimately, that is what leads to their downfall. But Grace Bernard's revenge is only bittersweet.

Dictionary Corner 📚

fug: (informal British) stuffy or smokey atmosphere

gazump: (informal British) acquiring a property by making a higher offer than the one previously accepted

ignominy: public contempt, disgrace, dishonour 

prescient: having knowledge of events before they take place

stultify: cause to lose enthusiasm through tedium or restrictive routine

vertiginous: related to vertigo; causing dizziness or nausea

WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS

A Deeper Dive

Much like any piece of content told from the killer's perspective, (but unlike true crime; nobody sane ever sympathised with Jeffery Dahmer) we find ourselves connecting with Grace. Particularly as a woman reading her story, I share her annoyance with the commercialisation of 'self-care' as yet another array of products and services for women to buy. Throughout the story, we discover that Grace has consumed a lot of feminist literature - including De Beauvoir, Wollstonecraft, and Plath - and holds strongly feminist views. She is critical of how her male targets treat the women they interact with; predominantly drawing on her mother's experience with her aloof father, Simon Artemis. Equally, though, she casts aspersions on the women she observes seeking validation through the attention of men. 

"How little men promise. How much we grasp at it."

p.113

The book is remarkably self-aware when Grace professes to us that she doesn't want her crimes getting out to the public (apart from the obvious reasons) because the tabloids would have a field day casting her in the "'vicious feminist' narrative". 

Though we understand that Grace doesn't idolise her mother, she is unaware of her extreme biases towards her. For example, when describing her best friend's fiancee with great distaste, Grace comments on how "posh girls don't need bras", whereas her mother's renouncing of the same article is an effortless French girl style. This strong loyalty to her mother and her experience with wealthy men taking advantage (and the poverty that followed) is ultimately what leads Grace down her murderous path.

Interestingly, Grace repeatedly points out how members of the wealthier classes get away with bad behaviour, like her oblivious half-sister's atrocious treatment of the nail salon staff. Moreover, she emphasises that the effect is compounded for men in these groups, as they grow up confident in their power and the knowledge that those around them will be subservient to it. Grace makes this critical claim: "Even if you hate that kind of attitude, it's hard to push back against it sometimes. And then later, you hate yourself for enabling it." (p.121). This could be a nod to her mother's compliance in her own downfall, as she allowed herself to be discarded into the powerless class Grace was raised in.

Early on, the audience discovers that Grace is currently in prison awaiting an appeal on her sentence, which she clarifies is not for one of the murders she has actually committed. A common theme across the books I've read this year is the wrongful imprisonment of women (see Woman on the Edge of Time), which reflects a very real history of silencing women through psychiatry. While Grace describes to us how she meticulously researched and planned each of the murders she committed, we sense her impotence in her incarceration.

It is here that the reader learns, even before Grace does, that she has a half brother, Harry — yet another child jettisoned with its mother once Simon Artemis had had his fun. Annoyingly, the brother one-ups Grace in her own game, taking advantage of her murders to gain access to the wealthy Artemis family, inserting himself into their father's life, and subsequently gaining his trust as Simon falls into the pitfalls of paranoia. Despite his blatant horror at Grace's actions and his claim that he could never drum up the same hatred for their father, Simon's untimely death occurs at the hands of his son; and Harry stands to gain everything that Grace had been working towards.

Brother dearest nicely sums up the frustrating situation we as the readers and Grace find ourselves in: once again, a man has won out over a woman because he was simply born with an advantage. "It might initially feel as if a man has swooped in and taken your victory away from you, but that's not it at all."

"I just had better cards."

p.354

Ultimately, this is just two abandoned children who felt entitled to their father's money and justified their egregious actions by describing in great detail how they had been wronged by this extremely wealthy, out-of-touch family.

Grace is an unusually self-aware character, clearly holding feminist (perhaps even misandrist) views, and yet she expresses an ugly distaste for the habits of her peers. She has expensive taste (e.g. Le Labo toiletries), wears opulent clothing to impress others, but sees the inequity between social classes and sexes and combats them, even if her motives are entirely selfish. An interesting dichotomy of modern feminism and the internalised misogyny that we all suffer from, Mackie has graced us with a highly relatable character. Although, I hope not many of us have turned our hatred for our fathers into lethal focus.