The body keeps the score. In the Russo family, the body keeps the script.

When Nell Russo dies, her wheelchair sits empty at the head of the dinner table for three weeks before anyone dares move it. Her four survivors continue their choreographed existence: Jamie swimming through air when no pool exists, Dorothy walking counterclockwise orbits until her feet bleed, Martin dismantling and rebuilding the same broken drawer seventeen times, Becca framing every moment through a camera that hasn't worked in years.

They call it grief. They're wrong.

Hidden in the attic, Becca discovers five notebooks and a hard drive—Nell's meticulous documentation of her life's work. Not raising a family, but engineering a "distributed anatomy." Each person a body part. Each movement programmed through decades of calculated reinforcement. The swimming, circling, fixing, recording: not trauma responses but systematic behavioral conditioning so precise their muscles reject any deviation like transplanted organs rejecting foreign tissue.

As the family excavates the architecture of their own programming, they discover something more disturbing than control—its persistence after the controller is gone. But in the ruins of Nell's design, unexpected growth appears. A tomato plant at the wrong angle. A swimming lesson where the water becomes optional. A cabinet left beautifully, deliberately broken.

With prose that makes you feel the phantom chlorine burning Jamie's throat and the perfect weight of teacups in Dorothy's trembling hands, THE FAMILIAR SYSTEM is a searing exploration of how families manufacture consciousness and how consciousness might, against all programming, choose to manufacture itself. This is a novel about the difference between connection and control, between growing and performing, between the family as prison and the family as ecosystem.

Brian Dale Babiak MD

Published audiobooks