Inventing the Abbotts (1997)

Michael Keaton: Narrator

Quotes 

• Narrator : My mother's life had been damaged by a lie, and my brother was forever lost in a maze of illusions that lie had created... and I had followed him there. Jacey would never find his way out, but I had to... and the only way I could do that was to forgive, but I could never forget.

• Narrator : The truth about our mother and Lloyd didn't comfort Jacey, because the truth seemed to him just as unfair as the lie he had always believed in.

• Narrator : My mother was right; if the Abbotts didn't exist, Jacey would have had to invent them, but it seems to me that inventing the Abbotts was something that almost everyone in Haley did, and still do. Alice reunited with Peter, lived out the same lie of a happy marriage that her mother and father have lived, and a new generation of Abbott parties began.

• Narrator : Although she seemed unique to me then, I now know that the world is filled with working women raising children by themselves. There was nothing especially original about my mother... not even in the way she finally brought her sons back together again.

• Narrator : Jacey pretended to care for Alice so well, the illusion became so complete that even he was fooled.

• [first lines] 

  Narrator : The end of my innocence and childhood began in 1957. It is remarkable to me now just how little I knew then about the people around me. It took me years to figure out exactly what the truth was, especially given my brother's knack at inventing facts. My mother once told me that if the Abbotts didn't exist, my brother would have had to invent them.

• Narrator : Everything Jacey wanted in life, the Abbotts already had: their cars, money, country clubs. But in the beginning, more than anything else, he wanted Eleanor Abbott. I'd witnessed enough of my brother's social agony to resolve early on. I would never let the Abbotts matter to me.

• Narrator : I had always thought of Eleanor Abbott as just another stuck-up rich girl, a flirt, a tease. But she proved to be a bigger rebel than I ever was. Jacey and I never talked about that thing with Eleanor in the garage, but Jacey never bragged about his conquests. When he went off to college that fall, I didn't feel particularly sad, I felt free.

• Narrator : My brother was more successful at reinventing himself than I was. Jacey's parties at the University of Pennsylvannia were the hippest ones around. And even though he had a major in architecture, he seriously minored in beautiful co-eds.