ResedaWeb.blog

Everything Reseda-esque... sporadically published news, trivia & links about the neighborhood and its neighbors

_________ A CIVIC BLOG

20050319

Home to 'America's Most Dysfunctional Family'

SPOTLIGHT: When Tim Ballou and Linda Higgins wanted to get a locale for the country's singlemost dysfunctional family, Reseda must have seemed just the place. It's called "The O'Dooles of Reseda: A Year in the Life of America's Most Dysfunctional Family." There are (as of this writing) 11 or some of the '95 novel out there for sale right now.
THE O'DOOLES is a one-of-a kind humor book which chronicles the bizarre lives of a fictional family in southern California through their outrageous (but real) correspondence which was actually sent to, and answered by, well-known individuals and entities such as George and Barbara Bush, Alan Dershowitz, Katie Couric and the American Dental Association.

Ballou his ownself describes the book that way to an email group for fans of The Who, because apparently Pete Townsend replied to a letter from a fictional O'Doole.

Book lands in a list of Dysfunctional Family Books from 1995-1999, listed between: "Drug abuse prevention through family interventions" Ashery, R. S., E. B. Robertson, et al., U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services National Institutes of Health National Institute on Drug Abuse Division of Epidemiology and Prevention Research; and "Families in pain : working through the hurts" by Balswick, J. K. and J. O. Balswick.

It's a long list.

Google says -- & if it's what can be deciphered from an "access denied" link -- the Cleveland (the city in Ohio, not the high school in Reseda) Public Library says it's in Marion, Ohio branch records under epistolary (letter written) fiction. That's completely pointless info until it's noted that Marian (with an 'a') was the former name of Reseda.