by Janny Scott
First published 2019
Journalist Janny Scott returns to the eight-hundred-acre estate her great-grandfather built on Philadelphia's Main Line. Land, houses, and money have passed through generations of her family, but her father Robert Montgomery Scott met a puzzling end despite his inheritance. Scott excavates the rarefied world that shaped her charming yet unknowable father. She traces how extraordinary good fortune influenced choices across lifetimes. Some family members flourished, like her grandmother Helen Hope Scott, the socialite and horsewoman who inspired Katherine Hepburn's character in The Philadelphia Story. Others found the weight of inheritance more complex. Scott brings her journalistic skills to uncover buried secrets and examine the tenacity of addiction. She searches to understand how financial, cultural, and genetic inheritance conspired in one person's self-destruction. The investigation becomes both family history and detective story, exploring how privilege can corrupt across generations.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, biography-memoir, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: detective-story, family-history
Setting: Main Line, Philadelphia
Period: 20th-century
288 pages · Hardcover · Riverhead Books
Content warnings: addiction, mental-illness