House of Happy Endings: A Memoir
by Leslie Garis
The High Price Of Privilege
Howard Garis, creator of the famed Uncle Wiggily series, along with his
wife, Lilian, were phenomenally productive writers of popular children’s
series—including The Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift—from 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 Dell—where Robert Frost often
sat in conversation over sherry, and stories appeared to spring from the
very air—all 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 Endings is Leslie Garis’s mesmerizing, tender, and

harrowing account of coming of age in a wildly imaginative, loving, but
fatally wounded family.
Personal Review: House of Happy Endings: A Memoir by Leslie
Garis
House of Happy Endings: A Memoir by Leslie Garis
As a young girl hiding in the dark corners and the dumbwaiter of the Dell,
the newly purchased mansion in idyllic Amherst, Massachusetts, Leslie
Garis listened to whispered parental exchanges with the highly attuned
sense of foreboding peculiar to intutitive children. Although Roger Garis
approached work on his fledgling magazine, The Pioneer, with manic
purpose, his early failure to launch a most difficult enterprise signaled the
grandiosity, much as the Dell itself did, that would comprise an aspect of
his addictive, unstable personality. Garis' failure to graduate from a handful
of colleges points to a man for whom doing what was necessary to get
from point a to point b was beyond him. The rules of conventional living, e.
g., working at a job he loathed, did not apply to him.
Unlike her brothers, Ms. Garis, as first-born, benefitted from parents who
were financially and socially comfortable with themselves and Amherst's
intellectual community. When her grandparents, Howard, the creator of
the Uncle Wiggily books, and Lilian, a writer for the Bobbsey Twins series,
move into the Dell, the delicate family balance tips. Financially supported
by his parents, Roger Garis chose to overlook his mother's difficult and
imperious behavior towards him, his wife, and his children. Lilian's
unchallenged abuse, an abuse her son would later duplicate, created an
environment in the Garis family where shoddy behavior was tolerated.
After Lilian dies, Howard Garis' drinking escalates along with his son's
prescription pill addiction and bouts of mental illness. Destined to doom,
Mabel, Roger's harried wife, fifteen years his junior, struggles to prop up
this father and son team and create a semblance of family normalcy. Yet
the decisions the Garis family makes increasingly revolve around Roger's
demands, his next pill, his next chichi institution, his next Caribbean trip,
leaving the other family members, especially Leslie's brothers, on an
empty field with scant parental emotional or financial support. As the
money dwindles, the choices shrink, and the magic house is sold.
An early confidante of her flailing tweed-clad father, Ms. Garis long viewed
him with a tolerance and awe prompted, perhaps, by his artistic
frustrations. An enterprising daughter of privilege, although now without
means-overreaching, she escapes to Vassar, I'm free, I'm finally free, and
flees to Paris after graduation. Wherever she is, Ms. Garis carries in her
mind the patches of family chaos she has left behind in western
Massachusetts. Marrying the handsome, young, successful playwright,
Arthur Kopit, a man whose work Roger admires seems again an effort to
please her father or a subconscious wish to perpetuate the literary spouse
cycle. For someone who also had a complicated father, it was a relief to
read that Leslie Garis in spite of suffering from depression created with her
husband and three children (and their attendant genetic issues) a house
that truly did have a happy ending. That struggle, too, could be a memoir.

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