More than any other writer, Alice McDermott exposes the vein of poetry, of profound joy and pain that transforms everyday experience into the heroic and universal. At Weddings and Wakes tells the bittersweet, lovable, human story of an Irish-Catholic family on Long Island as seen through the eyes of two sisters and a brother. Weekly visits to Brooklyn usher the children into an airless world of memory, recrimination and eternal repartee. In the daily routines of family, they witness the ebb and flow of drama and melodrama, the cycles of dissatisfaction and recurring affection.