Two days before Jeanne McCulloch was to marry, her father John suffered a massive stroke and lay in a coma from which he would not emerge. Patricia McCulloch, Jeanne's formidable mother, insisted that the celebration proceed at the family's beachfront East Hampton estate as planned.
So begins All Happy Families, Jeanne McCulloch's absorbing memoir of growing up in Manhattan's Upper East Side and on Long Island. The timing of its publication couldn't be better. Orchestrated by the wedding planner and complete with bagpipes, a guest list drawn from the Social Register, lilies of the valley, and the ocean as backdrop, Jeanne's nuptials, took place on August 13, 1983. You can take All Happy Families to the beach and thanks to McCulloch's sharp observations and imagine you are among the guests.
Here's what Vogue writer has to say about All Happy Families:
[McCulloch] is by turns piercingly vivid and and devastatingly amusing nonetheless, evoking the smell of her siblings’ take-out food in a hospital room where her father lies comatose, her husband summarizing their relationship in a gesture of leaves falling from a tree, and tour de force period pieces, such as the below description of her mother and her girlfriends:
“Nancy and Mu regularly came with their husbands to visit us at the house by the sea, and the three women would do exercise classes together on the lawn, poking their pedicured pink toes into the air for a few minutes to tone their legs, then breaking for a cigarette.” Talking of cigarettes, the special emphatic language her mother has developed around smoking is skewered to perfection by the author. “This was cigarette smoking in ‘I just had to call and vent’ mode, the indignant inhale, the agitated exhale. . . . There was busy smoking—economic quick puffs in rapid succession, or busy with no hands free—speaking on the phone and writing, say, or sorting through place cards for a party, in which the cigarette was held in a clench between her lips. Then there was brooding smoking, the deep inhales and the long, whooshing exhales.”
There is much to enjoy here and much to think about. The most ritualistic and defining of family occasions—a wedding, a death, Christmas—are pulled apart and held up to the light. McCulloch shows all the pieces in turn and the past that led to now. In the midst of all these fragments straining for togetherness, there is, in fact, nuance and grace.
You can read the complete review here.
Read an excerpt of All Happy Families here.
-- sdl
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