We Were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates’s novel tells the story of the Mulvaneys, a seemingly charmed upstate New York family whose life quietly disintegrates after their daughter Marianne is assaulted and the family cannot absorb the shame. Narrated years later by the youngest son, the book follows each member into exile and estrangement, then toward a fragile reckoning. It is a large, compassionate portrait of a family’s fall and endurance.