cover image House of Happy Endings: A Memoir

House of Happy Endings: A Memoir

Leslie Garis, . . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24 (339pp) ISBN 978-0-374-29937-8

A rtfully stitched like a well-made quilt, the patches of Garis's memoir encompass three generations. When she was eight years old, her grandmother Lilian, who wrote the early Bobbsey Twins , and grandfather Howard Garis, who created and virtually became Uncle Wiggily, moved into her family's home in Amherst, Mass. In this spellbinding memoir of green moments and gray ones, Garis chronicles how, in this book-reading, music-playing and, most importantly, loving family of writers, her grandmother “went from being a vibrant woman to a recumbent recluse” and how the years damaged her father, who “seemed perfect”; her “beautiful” mother; and her “adorable” brothers. “You can't turn away from the truth because it's lurid and jarring,” her playwright father advises. In lesser hands, the quarrels, litigation and violence that surface might control the narrative, but even as the family copes with disappointment, financial stress, nervous breakdowns, physical illness and death, Garis's capacity for conveying the family's vibrancy and vigor trumps. Garis's remarkable accomplishment in this memoir is to convey the normal, the enviable and the gothic with unsentimentalized affection, grace and painful honesty. (July)