Mr Franzen tests the Berglunds' union with miserable in-laws, half-hearted sex, temptation, alcoholism, noisy neighbours and teenage children who are all-knowing as well as wilfully half-blind.
For me, growing up in the north of Nigeria, the symbolism seemed very different: it showed one half of a wilfully bisected country, and I was living in the half that the insurrection had rendered invisible.
The interplay between Camille, her sociopathic mother, her wayward and troubled half-sister and her wilfully ignorant stepfather is a chilling and compelling masterclass in denial and scapegoating.
Much like the street harassment videos and the work of projects such as Everyday Sexism, these kinds of experiments are merely neon-signed landmarks in a world that is often wilfully oblivious to the ways in which half the population is diminished.
Few generations are quite as wilfully self-mythologising as the baby boomers: they've spent half a century talking their youth up as a nonpareil, you-had-to-be-there era of creativity, helpfully impressing upon future generations that nothing they could achieve in pop culture could quite hope to live up to it.
Harriet Wistrich, of the law firm Birnberg Peirce & Partners, said: "The police have been on notice of this case for three and a half years and until this judgment, they have wilfully refused to engage in any meaningful way with the most serious allegations put to them.
By the end of the first half it had become clear that, no matter how wilfully surreal a Fringe production might be, life itself can always go one better.
The temptation is to tut and ask why they didn't play in the first half, say, the way they did in the second, as if they had wilfully chosen not to.
In all, 3,200 were murdered under his dictatorship, half of them in his first year [1973-74]... Some 30,000 more were tortured.Was Friedman wilfully ignorant about these aspects of Pinochet's record? Was he flattered by the opportunity to stamp a country with his ideas?
Tested by miserable in-laws, half-hearted sex, temptation, alcoholism, noisy neighbours and teenage children who are both all-knowing and wilfully blind.
