Family Matters: Estrangements and Improvisations

On Mother's Day 2019, I take Mama to the home of her best childhood friend for dinner. Her friend's family includes a sister, a brother, her friend's father (still grinning in his midnineties), and numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins. Over a dozen people all told. They're an outgoing, good-looking bunch. I can't wander to any corner of the house and not find myself engaged in discussion about their hopes for the future or banter about the pleasures of retirement. The sister is a retired educator who enjoys the quiet of not being surrounded by moody teens all day. The brother bought a luxury car and took up golf. One of the nephews plans to support his infant son by getting promoted at a food distributorship. But his real dream is to build houses one day.

Mama and I find ourselves at this event because what is Mother's Day but the celebration of family? Only our family is in tatters. Her parents passed decades ago. Her brother is in a psychiatric ward in a nursing home in central Louisiana. My brother lives in Georgia and rarely returns home. My dad died during the Obama administration, and I don't have children. Not long after our arrival—before dessert is served—I suggest that we leave. The joy is strong here, and it feels lent, not owned. She agrees. Not much later, I watch her walk the lane up to her little third-floor apartment, carrying a plate of Chantilly cake wrapped in foil.

In 1983, my parents purchased a ranch-style house in the suburbs east of New Orleans. Apparently, in the years before we arrived, developers had plans for an ambitious complex of neighborhoods. The plans were so ambitious that the federal government built new exit ramps from I-10. But the project never reached fruition. The additional neighborhoods were never built. To this day, the cloverleaf exits northeast of our old suburb dead end to Bayou Sauvage, a wildlife refuge.

But for about half a decade in the 1980s, we were a nuclear family. My parents, my older brother, and me. Because I was a child in Reaganera America, a time when cartoons were mostly about teams of good, perfect people fighting teams of bad, flawed people (G.I. Joe, Transformers, Care Bears, Rainbow Brite, etc.), I saw my family as a team. Only we were far from perfect. We had shouting matches. We threw dishes. We kicked in doors. We wrecked cars while drunk. Flawed we were, but we hid those flaws within the four walls of our home as best we could.

Jeanne McCulloch's fascinating new memoir, All Happy Families, explores the myth that happy families exist at all. Tolstoy's oft-repeated saying that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way is deftly demonstrated within these pages. On the surface, McCulloch's upper-crust New York family has every reason to be happy. In the 1970s, they live in a posh condo on the Upper East Side, go on safari in Africa—where the family patriarch converses with the locals in Swahili—and summer at their beachfront home in the Hamptons. But as a girl, McCulloch, who would later become an editor for the Paris Review and Tin House, is squeamish about revealing her family's privilege to others: "The thing I lied about with frequency was my address." McCulloch avoided telling the curious that she grew up at the top of a duplex on Park Avenue. In later scenes, her family will travel from Manhattan to Long Island where, at their summer home, their chef, Johanna, will have minor territorial squabbles with their housekeeper and their gardener. But McCulloch's mildly conflicted feelings regarding her economic privilege is mostly glossed over.

The memoir is not about a clan of rich people living it up, but about her family. The core of that family, her mother, is Mrs. McCulloch, regnant of their sprawling beach house called Children at Play. The book starts with Mrs. McCulloch walking into the sea. In a...