The Family Snitch: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies

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.

Francesca Fontana has been a reporter for the Wall Street Journal since 2018 and also hosts a weekly WSJ podcast, What’s News in Markets. In 2020, She won a Front Page Award for Specialized Reporting: Personal Service. She lives in New York City.