First published 2011
Stephanie Madoff Mack chronicles her family's destruction after Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme collapsed. She describes her fairy tale wedding to Mark Madoff on Nantucket and what life inside the Madoff family really looked like before the scandal broke. When Bernie confessed that his wealth management empire was built on lies, Mark and his brother Andrew turned their father in and severed all contact with their parents. Stephanie watched her husband transform into someone she barely recognized as shame and betrayal consumed him. The family faced lawsuits demanding $200 million while media attention intensified. Mark hanged himself on the second anniversary of his father's arrest, leaving Stephanie to raise their two young children alone. She wrote this memoir to preserve her children's understanding of who their father truly was and to defend his innocence. The book reveals intimate details about the confession's aftermath, the media circus that followed, and how quickly an idyllic life can crumble.
Genres: crime, biography-memoir, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Nantucket
Period: 2000s
272 pages · Hardcover · Blue Rider Press
Content warnings: suicide