Family Across Town: My Father's Double Life, A Memoir

For readers drawn to complex family narratives, a contemporary memoir about uncovering a life-altering family secret.

A Family Across Town is a riveting literary memoir about the devastating power of family secrets and the quiet damage caused by lives built on deceit. Growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, Aynah Askanas and her three siblings always felt something was off in their family. Only in adulthood would the staggering truth be revealed: their father had a double life with another woman and two daughters just across town.

In the aftermath of that discovery, she begins to examine not only her father’s deception, but the emotional architecture that made it possible. Why would a man choose a life divided between two families? Why would her mother remain in a marriage to someone who was never fully present? And how did growing up inside a lie shape the identities, relationships, and well-being of the four siblings left to make sense of it all?

By turns reflective, darkly funny, candid, and shocking, A Family Across Town explores betrayal, family dysfunction, and the psychological cost of secrecy across generations. This memoir asks what happens when the people closest to us turn out to be strangers—and whether the truth can heal a family long after the damage is done.