Childhood Memoir of Wacky House Too Real to Be Fictional : BACK IN THE BLUE HOUSE, <i> by Jeff Giles,</i> Ticknor & Fields, $18.95; 214 pages

Well, it’s started to happen. Our very own lives have begun to be written down. Our children have risen up, taken up pen and paper and word processor and begun to tell the tales we always hoped would remain secret.

Somewhere along the line we’ve become the crazy old folks. The childhoods that are written about today are not the ones that we lived through but the ones we engineered. Oh dear. What have we done? It’s not so much how much we failed, but how much we must have succeeded--in creating chaos, becoming bad jokes, for the edification of our children.

It’s hard to know how to respond to “Back in the Blue House.” The flap copy cloaks memoir in a gauzy veil, describing the work as an “autobiography-as-fiction.” Then the descriptions slip quickly to “Wacky Packages” and other artifacts of the ‘70s.

No one wants to describe this wonderful book as what it is: American social realism, at least for 50% of the population. Fifty percent of marriages in America end in divorce. But 100% of families remain families, whether a divorce occurs or not. This is a fact that can give you the heebie-jeebies, the kind of phenomenon that sends you into headlong denial. Just call that stuff fiction and change the subject to “wacky packages.”

But Jeff Giles--like Christopher Isherwood before him--gently insists on the marriage of fiction and reality. His mother, in this four-part memoir, really is his mother. His father, sister, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins are real. Even his girlfriend really is his girlfriend. His childhood really was his childhood, and his narrative style here is to perfectly entwine accuracy and forgiveness.

Jeff’s mother had to quit school a little early. She helped support her own parents. “All the while, she dreamt of the only thing there was to dream of: marriage. It was a peculiar fate, and my mother’s generation, I think, was the last to be tied to it. Women fled from one man’s house to another.”

Jeff’s dad is storybook handsome, a fixer-of-things, an airline pilot. But equally tied into the customs of his day, he’s addicted to women, giddy from girls, incorrigible in his constant and relentless pursuit of the opposite sex.

Jeff’s mother, a pistol to begin with, a high-strung, funny, colorful user of strong language, flips out at the dozens and dozens of other women in her married life. She kicks her husband out, but not before the terrible fights begin.

Jeff’s older sister, Susan, enthusiastically joins in these fights, trying to keep her parents from killing each other and endangering her own life and limb in the process.

Susan becomes--the language doesn’t yet have non-judgmental words for this--the actor-out, the hard drinker, the screamer, the delinquent. Jeff becomes the prissy one, the one who won’t talk, who stays in his room, who zones out , waiting for the storms to pass.

When that robot-pilot-dad finally does the unthinkable and marries one of his stewardesses (and for her, that must have been like being the one millionth customer at Disneyland and getting the free Oldsmobile), Jeff’s mom goes a little bit crazy.

She talks all night into tape recorders. She eats whole cartons of Peppermint Patties. And, truth be told, the pilot-dad, even after having married the legendary Joy, can’t stay out of his ex-wife’s house or his ex-wife’s bed. In his own way, he is just as out-on-a-string as the mother of his children.

This seems to be what we have done in America. It appears to be the way things are now. Our family structure has become unutterably complex. It is supremely difficult now, for all the moms and dads and sons and daughters and all the Joys and Brendas and Lindas who walk into long-unfolding dramas somewhere toward the end of Act 2 and clumsily--but with what good will--take up their thankless parts.

It is, for 50% of the population, what it means to be in an American family.

If you ever wake up in the night in a cold sweat, pondering what you have done, how you have screwed things up for your kids, you might want to buy a stack of these books. “Back in the Blue House” is both healing and true.

Give it to your parents, your children, your friends with broken hearts. Give it to yourself. Family means everything to Jeff Giles. Divorce, drink, all those stewardesses don’t even dent it.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews “The Anthropology of Everyday Life” by Edward T. Hall (Doubleday).