Open any closet.  You will find a family secret.  . . . Perhaps your secret will tell you why the smell of garlic makes you hear your mother's song or why a row of brown bottles on a shelf sends you off to phone your cousin.  Open any door and find family.  Those whose blood is the same as yours, those you've married, those you've lost, those you've found, those you've chosen. ( xiv-xv)

The first part of this assignment requires you to open the closets in your family's history and find a story that needs to be told.  Play around with the story you decide to tell through the writing exercises.  Read the stories in Family and find one that you'd like to model your essay around.  Do you want to tell about your family, like Brent Staples does, by focusing on one of your own obsessions and showing us how that obsession developed?  Do you want to tell about the death of an important figure in your family by moving back and forth through time, like Chang-Rae Lee does?  Or, like Bob Shacochis in "From Here to Maternity" do you want to describe a process or a trial that your family has gone through?  You have lots of options. 

Think of yourself as Jane Smiley thinks of her three-year-old son in her afterward, "Gen-Narration."  As he stands beside her during the eulogy she's delivering for her grandmother, she believes that he is looking out at his aunts and uncles and cousins,

Surveying his past, beginning to write his novel, assembling his characters in his subconscious to live alongside the immediate Freudian ones of Mom, Dad, sisters, and I like to think that our voices, speaking of our grandmother, entered him and lodges there, just at the boundary of conscious memory, ready to emerge when all of us are gone, and  he is speaking to our unknown descendants. (247)