Relatively Painless, a linked story collection follows the Grunman family across four decades — from the 1970s to the early 2000s. It tenderly traces the bruising, and often darkly comic life of a family that loves each other in all the wrong registers.

At its center are Daniel and Lindsay, adult children of Paul and Ellen Grunman, a New England academic couple whose intellectual snobbery, unexamined drinking, and talent for the oblique wound shape everything that follows. Paul is a college arts administrator — brilliant, bisexual, emotionally armored, and given to dispensing wisdom he doesn’t quite practice. Ellen is a woman of real wit and suppressed literary ambition who gave up her own voice when she married and now channels her love through money, criticism, and an uncanny ability to say exactly the wrong thing with absolute sincerity.

Daniel becomes a stand-up comedian and writer, spending his twenties broke and itinerant, performing at showcase clubs while his parents arrive late, leave early, and ask if he can go up sooner. Lindsay becomes a dancer who ages out of dancing, moves to Los Angeles, and eventually creates and executive produces a critically acclaimed drama called Served Cold — a show loosely based on her own family, which her parents barely know exists.

The stories move between childhood and middle age, interweaving the siblings’ separate struggles for recognition with their parents’ quiet, complicated marriage. Daniel and Lindsay as children huddle over a heating vent trying to decode their parents’ first real fight. Their father carries Daniel in from the car at night, both of them pretending he’s asleep. Lindsay grieves her girlfriend Michelle’s suicide — navigating the girl’s homophobic mother, a Cape Cod funeral, and an unexpected inheritance — while Daniel performs heckler bits in nightclubs and slowly stops asking for things he can’t have.

Paul and Ellen appear in their own scenes too: Ellen at her hairdresser, free-associates about cigarettes and a professor who found her attractive; Paul and Ellen play Scrabble in near-silence, each privately aware of checks being written and secrets being kept.

The book’s emotional spine is the Grunman children’s lifelong, futile effort to be seen by their parents — not as proof of the parents’ competence, not as recipients of love expressed as critique, but simply as people who’ve done something worth acknowledging. Daniel never gets his mother to remember his published books. Lindsay never gets her father to say, straightforwardly, that he’s proud of her show. And yet — in layover conversations at LAX, in late-night arguments over Scrabble, in a hushed exchange outside a comedy club — something real and irreducible keeps passing between them all.

The title comes from a line Paul always says at the end of family gatherings, once the car is far enough from the relatives’ house: “Well. That was relatively painless.” It becomes the signal — and ultimately the emblem — of the book’s defining negotiation: the gap between the love that’s felt and the love that can be said.

The final story, Transparency, takes place after Paul’s death. Daniel meets his mother at a New York restaurant. She orders wine. She steps outside to smoke. He watches her through the glass and finds that the pane gives him exactly enough distance. He can love her through it.

Relatively Painless listens to the ways families talk past each other for decades and still manage, somehow, to mean the world to one another.