"Snapshots is the story of an all-American Irish Catholic family - a story of love, fear, sexual awakening, emotional infidelities, and the simple difficulty of intimate communication. It begins on December 24, 1997, as Kate, Patty, Sean, and Nora Mahoney, all in their thirties now, are on their way home to the family's Jersey shore beach house. Beginning on this Christmas Eve, William Norris's highly original novel takes us backward in time, through twenty-five years of the Mahoneys' lives as a family, to discover how they came to be the people they are today.". "They seem to be the perfect family: an attorney and a schoolteacher living happily with their four children in an affluent New Jersey suburb. But as the author engages our endless fascination with what goes on behind other people's closed doors, he begins to lay bare the secrets the Mahoneys keep from themselves, and from one another.". "Kate is married and settled now, but she was always the rule-breaker, a gifted artistic prodigy who pushed all the limits. And she paid a price, the whole family did, for her extraordinary vision, as she struggled on the fringes of mental illness. A straight-A student, Patty could handle the liquor in high school, college, even med school. But now that she's a doctor, she's got to face her demon. Growing up in this Irish Catholic family, Nora never dreamed that they would accept her as she really was, and eventually welcome her partner, Eve, into their home. Although Sean was the son that Pat Mahoney had so much wanted, the boy was nothing like him, a son who would rather be in the kitchen cooking with his mother than playing baseball. But it's Liz Mahoney who has held the family together, even as she wonders what's become of her marriage, as her husband works eighty-hour weeks to make partner at the firm. She worries about the people her children are becoming."--BOOK JACKET.