My generous friends took the time to share their reflections, their advice, and their experience in reading this manuscript in its varying stages. Christopher Merrill, Mona Simpson, Mindy Goldberg, Kathy Braddock, Jenny Armit, Sean Elder, Helen Klein Ross, John Benditt, Peter Von Ziegesar, James Lister Smith, Sharon Rapoport, Elizabeth England, Merrill Feitell, Peter Moore, Angelica Baird, and Andrew Herwitz. My cousin Bruce Jones supplied family history. Writers are nourished by community, and so to my band of bros at 189, to Janis Andres and my tribe of superwomen in Los Angeles, and to my colleagues and students at the Todos Santos Writers Workshop, most especially my cherished collaborator and tireless supporter Rex Weiner, I am extremely grateful. Amy Gross, first editor and mentor, put in place many of the most important lessons I learned about voice and narrative. Elissa Schappell assigned the original essay that grew into this book, Sean Elder, Stephen P. Williams, and Cathleen Medwick also edited essays that knit their way in. Erin Rech and Jennifer Lambert Churchill taught me more about digital marketing than I thought I could possibly learn. Nina Subin generously took my photograph in her sublime studio. Finally, thanks are due to AWW, for his unerring ear, his great good humor, and for his ace coparenting.
Three writers, very dear friends no longer on this planet, live on forever in my heart: George Plimpton, Agha Shahid Ali, and James Salter. The elegance and economy of their work remain inspirational, as does every single word of advice they gave me, on both literary and life matters.
And to my family. It’s never easy to have a writer in the clan, I get that. We each have our own version of events, and I’m grateful to you all, especially to my two sisters Darcy and Catherine, for giving me the space and the respect to tell mine.
About the Author
JEANNE McCULLOCH is a former managing editor of the Paris Review, a former senior editor of Tin House magazine, and the founding editorial director of Tin House Books. She is a founding director of the Todos Santos Writers Workshop. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review; Tin House; the New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; Allure; and the North American Review, among other publications. She lives with her family in New York.
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Copyright
all happy families. Copyright © 2018 by Jeanne McCulloch. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Portions of this work have appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: in O Magazine (2008) in an essay titled “The Maternal Heart” and in Allure magazine (2006) in an essay titled “The Perilous Dune,” which was also anthologized in Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune (2007).
Excerpt from Behind the Lines: The Oral History of Special Operations in World War II (“I sent one of our GIs …”) by Russell Miller; Macmillan, 2002.
Excerpt from Drums in the Balkan Night (“In June 1930, when John …”) by John I. B. McCulloch; G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1936.
first edition
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph courtesy of the author
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCulloch, Jeanne, author.
Title: All happy families : a memoir / Jeanne McCulloch.
Description: New York : Harper Wave, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018004273 (print) | LCCN 2018012284 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062234773 (eBook) | ISBN 9780062234759 (hardback) | ISBN 9780062848888 (audio)
Subjects: LCSH: McCulloch, Jeanne. | Editors—United States—Biography. | Periodical editors—United States—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Marriage.
Classification: LCC PN4874.M364 (ebook) | LCC PN4874.M364 A3 2018 (print) | DDC 070.5/1092 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004273
Digital Edition AUGUST 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-223477-3
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-223475-9
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