All Happy Families

Although the author's wedding frames the events of this memoir, it is her mother--imperious, manipulative, intelligent, and protective--who is the focus of this memoir, thanks in part to Gabra Zackman's evocative narration. Just days before the wedding, McCulloch's alcoholic father suffered a stroke and went into a coma that he never emerged from. McCulloch uses the occasion of the wedding to explore both her parents' marriage and her in-laws,' painting an incisive portrait of two very different families and lifestyles. Zackman uses distinct voices for each of the many characters. The male voices sometimes sound forced, but the women, especially McCulloch's affected mother and her steady, loving mother-in-law, sound natural, vivid, and memorable. E.C. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

June 25, 2018
In this intimate debut memoir, McCulloch, a former managing editor of the Paris Review, reflects upon her August 1983 Long Island wedding, an occasion marked by her father’s massive stroke two days before, and his death the day after. Rather than focus on her own marriage, which dissolved five years later, McCulloch examines the marriages of her parents and in-laws. McCulloch describes her privileged life growing up in the late 1960s and early ’70s in Manhattan and East Hampton; her father was a former intelligence officer and her mother prided herself on her social standing and her Lilly Pulitzer outfits. Although her father was “sweet and loving,” he was also an alcoholic, and his drinking put a strain on the family. Nevertheless, her parents enjoyed travel and social engagements, and both were elegant dancers; in fact, McCulloch writes that their “surety and synchronicity” of step exemplified what a perfect marriage should be. Her in-laws appeared devoted and content, yet her father-in-law fell in love with another woman several years after McCulloch’s wedding. Some interesting characters stand out—notably McCulloch’s strong and opinionated mother, who insisted that the wedding must go forward; her fun-loving mother-in-law; and the groom’s grandmother, who kept pictures of prewedding table settings because, though a marriage may not last, a photo of a table setting lasts forever. It’s a bittersweet story and a wonderful look at upper-class New York City life.

May 15, 2018
A distinguished editor and writer's tale of the people and events surrounding her first wedding.When McCulloch, a former managing editor of the Paris Review and editorial director of Tin House Books, married for the first time, the ceremony took place at her parents' beachfront home in the East Hamptons. The house, writes the author, "had a shabby grandeur to it that time forgot." This run-down elegance also characterized the Hamptons, which in 1983 was "known mainly for artists and potato fields and the fishermen who made their living trawling off Montauk Point." A few days before the wedding, McCulloch's father suffered a massive stroke, transforming a celebration into a crisis that revealed the cracked foundations undergirding the family. Not long before the ceremony, her affected and controlling mother, Patricia, had forced her lifelong alcoholic father, John, to stop drinking. Cessation sent John's body into withdrawal shock and caused his stroke. Yet despite the many problems they had with each other, both lived their lives as though their marriage and family were as happy as they were perfect. The author's own choice of husband disappointed Patricia, who had expected McCulloch to marry a "Social Register" man rather than Dean, "the boy next door." Shortly after the wedding and before McCulloch and her husband could even open wedding presents, John died. At first, Dean's wholesomely all-American family seemed to offer a haven to the author. But three years after the wedding, Dean's father told the family at a Christmastime gathering that he had fallen in love with another woman and eventually left to go live with her. Meanwhile, the author and her husband grew increasingly apart. By the fifth year of their marriage, "all we had in common was the desire not to hurt one another's feelings." McCulloch provides an honest and sensitive portrayal of family dysfunction as well as an evocation of a dying world of old-money wealth and privilege.A poignantly intimate memoir.

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July 1, 2018
On the weekend of her wedding, in 1983, McCulloch arrived at her family's summer home in the Hamptons to find that her father was comatose in the ICU. Earlier that week, he'd quit drinking, cold turkey, at McCulloch's mother's insistence that he shape up before the big event. The show, however, went on; McCulloch married Dean, her college sweetheart, and her father died shortly after. In her memoir of family and marriages?her own, her parents', and Dean's parents'?McCulloch doesn't so much attempt to make sense of the past as she tries to tell it straight. Most memorably, she unpacks the effects of her father's alcoholism on her entire life and, in doing so, lets him be both the voracious scholar and polyglot who invented stories of an octopus named Franklin for her, and a man for whom scotch became not a substance at all, but a characteristic. Scotch was my father, his smell. For her mother, also, McCulloch allows nuance and complication, with love. An eminently enjoyable take on the infinite tangles and triumphs of family.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)