All Happy Families: A Memoir Audiobook (Free)

The Glass Castle meets The Nest within this stunning debut, an intimate family memoir that gracefully provides 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, within the last days of the area’s quietly refined country splendor, before traffic jams and high-end boutiques morphed the peaceful enclave into about All Happy Families: A Memoir the ‘Hamptons.’ The elements is ideal, the tent is usually in place over the lawn.

But as the festivities are readied, the father from the bride-to-be, and ‘pater familias’ from the beachfront manse, suffers an enormous stroke from alcohol withdrawal, and lies in a coma in a healthcare facility in the next town. So begins Jeanne McCulloch’s vibrant memoir of her wedding ceremony weekend in 1983 and its after effects on her behalf family, and the category of the bridegroom. Inside a society described by appearance and process, the wedding goes on on the insistence of McCulloch’s theatrical mom. Instead of a planned honeymoon, wedding presents are stashed in the attic, preparations are made to get a funeral, and a team of attorneys arrive equipped with documents for McCulloch and her siblings to indication.

Mainly because McCulloch reveals, the repercussions from that weekend will ripple throughout her very own family, and that of her in-law’s lives because they grapple with queries of loyalty, custom, marital honor, wish, and reduction. Five years later on, her own brief marriage finished, she returns to East Hampton with her mom to divide the marriage presents that were never opened.

Impressionistic and lyrical, at turns both witty and poignant, All Content Families is certainly McCulloch’s clear-eyed account of her battle to hear her personal voice amid the noise of social mores and family dysfunction, in a global where all that glitters on the surface is not gold, and each unhappy family is certainly ultimately disappointed in its own unique way.