The Cup Castle meets The Nest with this stunning debut, an intimate family memoir that gracefully brings 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 marriage at a rambling family mansion on the beach in East Hampton, in 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 weather is ideal, the tent is normally in place around the lawn.

But as the festivities are readied, the daddy of the bride, and ‘pater familias’ of the beachfront manse, suffers an enormous stroke from alcohol withdrawal, and is based on a coma in the hospital in the next city. So starts Jeanne McCulloch’s vivid memoir of her wedding ceremony weekend in 1983 and its own after effects on her family, and the family of the groom. In a society described by appearance and process, the wedding continues on in the insistence of McCulloch’s theatrical mom. Instead of a well planned honeymoon, wedding ceremony presents are stashed in the attic, agreements are made for the funeral, and a team of attorneys arrive equipped with papers for McCulloch and her siblings to sign.

Simply because McCulloch reveals, the repercussions from that weekend will ripple throughout her own family, and that of her in-law’s lives as they grapple with queries of loyalty, tradition, marital honor, wish, and reduction. Five years later on, her own short marriage finished, she results to East Hampton with her mom to divide the wedding 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 struggle to hear her very own voice amid the noise of social mores and family dysfunction, in a world where everything glitters on the surface is not precious metal, and each unhappy family is usually ultimately unsatisfied in its unique way.