House of Happy Endings A Memoir [Paperback]

Howard Garis, creator of the famed Uncle Wiggily series, along with his wife, Lilian, were phenomenally productive writers of popular children's seriesincludingThe Bobbsey TwinsandTom Swiftfrom the turn of the century to the 1950s. In a large, romantic house in Amherst, Massachusetts, Leslie Garis, her two brothers, and their parents and grandparents aimed to live a life that mirrored the idyllic world the elder Garises created nonstop. But inside The Dellwhere Robert Frost often sat in conversation over sherry, and stories appeared to spring from the very airall was not right.

Roger Garis's inability to match his parents' success in his own work as playwright, novelist, and magazine writer led to his conviction that he was a failure as father, husband, and son, and eventually deepened into mental illness characterized by raging mood swings, drug abuse, and bouts of debilitating and destructive depression.House of Happy Endingsis Leslie Garis's mesmerizing, tender, and harrowing account of coming of age in a wildly imaginative, loving, but fatally wounded family.

[Garis] deftly works through the evidence, constructing moving and memorable portraits of her family members . . . There is no happy ending to this strange tale, which weaves its spell in the telling. William Grimes, The New York Times

Anybody who read Uncle Wiggily and The Bobbsey Twins thinking, Why isn't my family like that?' will count their ancestral blessings when they pick up this riveting tale, which unmasks the agonized reality behind the idyll. The prose is lucid, unornamented, but full of feeling. To enter this book is to assume the watchful air of a child who feels that it is up to her to hold together a family that is spinning apart with terrific centripetal force. Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and Cherry

House of Happy Endings conveys an exquisite restraint, a measured thoughtfulness that is simply eloquent. At tl#4