Suzanne Nelson was raised just outside of San Francisco. A Stanford grad and varsity runner, she heads to New York City for law school. She is gay, but has come out to no one. In New York she meets Kerry Neally, a New Yorker and fellow student. Who is straight. First in a study group and then as a pair, they find themselves become attached to one another. And have to work out that Kerry thinks she's straight. Eileen is Kerry's mother. She is a widow, and meeting Suzanne helps her leave the shell into which she placed herself after her husband died. And she comes to the attention of two men. One a widower. The other divorced. And love intevenes for her choice. With Suzanne settled into her New York life, she turns her back on her parents, who turned their backs on Suzanne's aunt Mary, a gay woman disowned by her parents and brother decades before. She, too, lives in New York and she and Eileen attempt to get Suzanne's parents to understand their daughter. Kate Nelson comes to New York to reason with her daughter. As eventually does William, her father. The story is about how the members of what becomes a large New York family deal with themselves, each other, and love.

The Neallys

Andrea Doyle: All the Weddings in the World and None of Them is Mine


My family is one extended Austen novel. A PBS dream. The wedding I was in Lenox, Massachusetts for was if my calculation is right the fifth in the last three years. I am the last one standing. Even Suzanne’s mother Kate spontaneously got married in a big house in Greenwich just the prior Saturday.


I am Andrea Doyle. My dream of my wedding was shattered last year when the man I wanted to and expected to marry told me when he was supposed to be proposing to me that he found somebody to love and that she was not named Andrea Doyle. He has not married her, so far as I have heard, but then again I have not found someone to love myself.


Chapter 96