At my sister’s wedding reception, my mother demanded I sign over the penthouse my grandmother left me—and when I refused, she slapped me in front of half of Boston. She thought that would finish me. Then my grandmother walked in with a lawyer.

Madison had wanted, or said she had wanted, a Boston society wedding. Whether that desire had begun in her own mind or had been planted there so early she mistook it for her own no longer mattered. By the night of the reception, the whole event had become exactly what my mother believed a wedding should be: a display of lineage, taste, alliances, and properly curated tenderness. There were old-money families present who specialized in wearing neutrality like an achievement. There were new-money couples performing ease with varying degrees of success. There were board members, law partners, development directors, minor philanthropists, junior executives, foundation wives, men who spoke only in compressed financial certainty, and women from Beacon Hill who had mastered the art of communicating moral judgment through jewelry selection alone. There were perhaps three hundred guests in total, and nearly all of them had the same polished social reflex: they knew how to remain in the room through discomfort, how to look politely away for exactly four seconds, and how to continue watching without seeming to stare. My mother trusted that reflex. It was one of the many forms of cowardice on which her public life depended.