The Glass Castle meets The Nest in this stunning debut, an intimate
family memoir that gracefully brings us behind the dappled beachfront
vista of privilege, to reveal the inner lives of two wonderfully
colorful, unforgettable families.
On a mid-August weekend, two families assemble for a wedding at a
rambling family mansion on the beach in East Hampton, in the last days
of the area's quietly refined country splendor, before traffic jams and
high-end boutiques morphed the peaceful enclave into the "Hamptons." The
weather is perfect, the tent is in place on the lawn.
But as the festivities are readied, the father of the bride, and "pater
familias" of the beachfront manse, suffers a massive stroke from alcohol
withdrawal, and lies in a coma in the hospital in the next town. So
begins Jeanne McCulloch's vivid memoir of her wedding weekend in 1983
and its after effects on her family, and the family of the groom. In a
society defined by appearance and protocol, the wedding goes on at the
insistence of McCulloch's theatrical mother. Instead of a planned
honeymoon, wedding presents are stashed in the attic, arrangements are
made for a funeral, and a team of lawyers arrive armed with papers for
McCulloch and her siblings to sign.
As McCulloch reveals, the repercussions from that weekend will ripple
throughout her own family, and that of her in-law's lives as they
grapple with questions of loyalty, tradition, marital honor, hope, and
loss. Five years later, her own brief marriage ended, she returns to
East Hampton with her mother to divide the wedding presents that were
never opened.
Impressionistic and lyrical, at turns both witty and poignant, All
Happy Families is McCulloch's clear-eyed account of her struggle to
hear her own voice amid the noise of social mores and family
dysfunction, in a world where all that glitters on the surface is not
gold, and each unhappy family is ultimately unhappy in its own unique
way.
