Janny: The Beneficiary is a family memoir spanning roughly three generations in my father's wealthy, aristocratic, Pennsylvania family. It's set almost entirely on a roughly eight-hundred acre, British-style country estate a half hour outside of Philadelphia, a place that has been compared to an American Downton Abbey sort of plucked from the pages of Henry James or Jane Austen and floated across the Atlantic and wedged in among the swimming pools of Updike and Cheever. It's also a kind of detective story, one child's attempt to understand a captivating but opaque parent and the family that produced them both. The question that drives that is how did the seemingly charmed life of my appealing, accomplished, but enigmatic father arrive at its self-destructive and perplexing end?