“The Loveliest Woman in America” is a beguiling title. It’s also a fascinating memoir written by Bibi Gaston as she attempts to exhume the life of her grandmother Rosamond Pinchot Gaston, who ended her own life at age 33 in 1938.

Bibi Gaston knew little of her grandmother’s or, indeed, her own family history until after her father, Bill Gaston’s, death in 2001. No one talked about the dark ribbon of emotional abuse, pain, divorces, estranged siblings, death and denial that threaded through the generations. Hers is a story of discovery, an anthropology of heart and soul, in which the players are multifaceted, displaying a broad range of prismatic personality, in every shade of light and dark. From it she delineates the parameters of family solidity, instability and betrayal – and, in the process, brings her own inner terrain into sharper focus. Her writing is deft and sure. It plumbs the stuff of life in a way that is, in turn, poetic, wry, humorous and, above all, spoken with the voice of truth and compassion.

Rosamond’s uncle Gifford Pinchot was chief of the U.S. Forest Service and governor of Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 1930s. He, and Rosamond’s father, Amos, were on intimate terms with President Teddy Roosevelt. Gifford Pinchot lived at Grey Towers, a replica in stone of a French chateau. The estate, now a National Historical Landmark, was the Pinchot family’s geographical epicenter, the place Rosamond and her family, Bibi included, came home to.

Another branch of the family was the power behind the establishment of New York City’s Central Park, and other family connections owned the Flatiron Building in New York City.

As for Rosamond, she personified the 1920s, becoming famous at age 18 when she starred in the theatrical production “The Miracle,” directed by Max Reinhardt, which also starred Lady Diana Manners, Vicountess Norwich, a British socialite and actress. Rosamond was luminous in the social and theatrical heavens of the time. She numbered Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt among her friends. She married William “Big Bill” Gaston, and spent time on islands off the Maine coast – Crotch, North Haven and Vinalhaven – where the family had summer places.

Bibi Gaston is able to piece the facts of her family’s history together because, miraculously, after her father’s death, she was given her grandmother Rosamond’s diaries and papers.

Even though the family Bibi Gaston chronicles is one of privilege and prominence, her story resonates in ordinary ways. The narrative reverberates with themes of love and loss, silence, family secrets, father-daughter relationships, suicide, divorce, the search for self, the need to know who we are and whence we came.

As a landscape architect, Bibi Gaston knows the topography of the earth. With “The Loveliest Woman in America,” she gives readers the topography of the heart of a family, and in it we find pieces of ourselves.