FOURTEEN, by Stephen Zanichkowsky, Basic Books, New York, 2002, 261 pages, hardcover, $25.

When I first heard about “Fourteen,” Stephen Zanichkowsky’s memoir of growing up alone and lonely in a family of 14 children, I simply didn’t believe it. Surely, I thought, there must be some warmth, some love, some child to bond with in a family of 14 kids? Surely, a mother wouldn’t go through with 14 births if she didn’t love children?

Not so. Born practically smack in the middle of the pack, number eight in this gang of 14, the greatest amount of parental attention Zanichkowsky remembers receiving was when his father beat him. Even then, he wasn’t alone. Like the making of the daily sandwiches, beatings would occur in an assembly line, two and three kids at a time.

“Fourteen” is not so much a story about growing up in a large family, even growing up lost in a crowd. It’s a story about abuse, about the toll that beatings, threats, lockdowns and basic inattention can take on a child and the isolation it wreaks on a family.

After growing up beaten, cowed, alone and unhappy in this family of 14, Zanichkowsky entered adulthood as a 1960s drifter. Having avoided both the draft and college, he spent years trying to make himself whole. He saw a range of therapists, educated himself in literature, art and math, eventually discovering a range of things he enjoyed doing, from driving motorcycles to studying karate to making exquisite furniture. He didn’t think of writing until 1991, when his father died. It was the first time in over 30 years that the entire family had been together.

“I saw a brother I hadn’t seen in 25 years,” said Zanichkowsky, who was raised in New York and New Hampshire but now lives in South Portland. “I wondered what type of family it was, why we hadn’t been all together since 1961.”

But it wasn’t until his mother’s funeral, 11 months later, the final time the children were together, that the photograph surfaced, the one picture the family had of itself. It wasn’t found over the mantel, or by their mother’s bed. It wasn’t even in a photograph album. A brother found it in a box of junk.

“It’s the only picture of our family that exists,” says Zanichkowsky. “There were no family pictures on the wall, no wedding pictures, no uncles and

aunts. We weren’t a normal kind of family.”

Few families are normal, but what struck Zanichkowsky at the time of their parents’ funerals was that even though his mother was quite ill in her last months, she died alone. Not one of her nine daughters or five sons was with her. But then, half of her children, whose ages ranged from 30 to 48, were living alone. Five of them had chosen not to have any kids “and those twelve who had married had collected twenty spouses,” as Zanichkowsky writes in the preface. “These numbers, which had been mere statistics . . . suddenly took on the weight of consequences.”

Consequences, and also questions, which Zanichkowsky spent the next couple of years asking, amassing hours of interviews with each of his siblings. He was hoping to publish an oral history of the family, with each person telling their story. Ironically, the numbers were against him again. Publishers thought there were too many people to juggle, too many voices. They wanted to hear his particular experience. So Zanichkowsky turned his questions on himself.

The result is a brutally honest, searching memoir, delving into the sordid misery of a childhood unleavened by love. It’s a survival account of life in a family that seems more like an orphanage than a home, a tale that begins with the endless toil of older kids pressed into changing and laundering diapers, making sandwiches and polishing shoes, and continues with Zanichkowsky’s desperate attempt to find privacy in the midst of a crowd while trying to blend in, because calling attention to one’s self usually meant getting a beating. He couldn’t even have friends, because visiting a friend without taking a brother or two along was not acceptable. Not only privacy, but private ownership was impossible. Kids stole from each other, repeatedly. Two children were institutionalized at different times, for differing reasons, yet nothing was said. The kids just disappeared.

“I began to escape,” he writes. “Not physically, of course, because . . . there was never an empty room to escape to. I began living inside my head, spacing out while talking to people.”

What he describes is a terrifying kind of willful schizophrenia, alternating fractions of seconds of attention for others with fractions of seconds of attention for himself.

It was a life so fraught with pain that when I met Zanichkowsky in the back of a coastal pizza shop this summer, I was surprised to be greeted by a person not only capable of social graces, but rather mild-mannered and easy-going, a genuinely sweet man who says he’s incapable of lying.

As a result of this unflinching honesty, three of his sisters are not speaking to him. “They really are pissed” with the book, he says. He believes their objections are mostly about shame. “Do people need to know that we got beaten with a stick? That we picked our noses and wrote on the wall? They’re upset that I didn’t write about fun, happy times.”

Zanichkowsky doesn’t remember happy times. “I had fun occasionally doing things with my brothers,” he says. “I never had fun with my parents. Never once.”

Others had a better time. “Even though we had the same parents, ate the same food, we had different experiences. Some are cheerful, some more happy dispositioned, I was more sensitive than the other kids. Some loved coming from a big family, it gave them distance from the parents, if Father was on a rampage, you could hide behind others. But I found there were other kinds of abuse than being beaten. I never got enough attention, never got encouraged,” Zanichkowsky adds.

“Why does a story like this have to be told?” his brothers and sisters asked him.

It’s a fair question for anyone to ask, for “Fourteen” is not a heartwarming tale. It is, instead, a book of questions, beginning with why so many children? The mother’s stock answer, “Wewanted as many children as God sought fit to give us,” just doesn’t cut it when a mother can’t rouse herself to care for these God-given children, expecting the oldest ones to spend their days caring for the younger ones.

Zanichkowsky does speak about his mother’s love for infants. He remembers her pride as she paraded around with ribbons on the carriage. But even teenage mothers soon realize that baby dolls turn into toddlers with fierce minds of their own. Why after the first eight, or even the first five children, were there so many more? Didn’t this mother know she was too exhausted to physically take care of her kids on her own? Too overwhelmed to appreciate them? Most families of her day, even Catholic families, found ways to limit their offspring. Once, only once, when Zanichkowsky asked his mother why she had so many children, did she give a different answer. “I thought I was giving my children a great gift, so many kids to play with.”

At that moment, I wanted to shake this mother, shake Zanichkowsky, too. I wanted him to tear more answers from her. What was she thinking? Why have kids if you’re going to lock them up? Why have kids if you’re going to beat them, abuse them so they find themselves stealing from each other and find so little pleasure, even in each other? Why have kids if you don’t care about them enough to keep their pictures nearby?

It is these questions that makes “Fourteen” such a resonant memoir, for such questions find their echoes in so many homes, so many lives. There are no answers for these questions – or there are a thousand answers, a million experiences. Zanichkowsky’s experience written with such courage and grit, while not an answer, surely is an insight.