RaveLos Angeles Review of Books“A woman walks into the sea.” So begins Jeanne McCulloch’s shimmering gem of a memoir...which elegantly recounts the unraveling of three unions ... All Happy Families is so much more than snapshots in a family album. It is an unflinching look at the darkness that tears at lives that appear, at first, so filled with promise and joy ... one might ask, why should we sympathize with the problems of the wealthy? However, All Happy Families transcends its setting amid the bearers of white privilege to become a universal work about loss—the loss we all feel as we recall summers past, marriages broken, parents in decline. It captures the double vision of retrospect, the way we, as adults, see things clearly both as we believed them to be and as they really were ... What is especially striking about McCulloch’s narrative is its lack of anger; although she in no way minimizes her parents’ individual faults, she is remarkably generous in her portrayals of them ... What elevates All Happy Families to the realm of literature is the quality of McCulloch’s style. Each sentence is beautifully crafted, at times calling to mind the writing of the late James Salter, whom McCulloch credits as inspiration in the acknowledgments. The prose has the same quality as the light in East Hampton—clear, bright, with moments of sharp focus and stretches shrouded in the gauzy, late afternoon haze of reflection[.]
