We were the Mulvaneys

We Were the Mulvaneys is a novel by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates, published in 1996.

Michael Mulvaney runs a roofing company and has made a place for himself in the town, and Corinne, his wife, organises her life around their four children: Michael junior, Patrick, Marianne and Judd. The rape of Marianne by a boy from a family the Mulvaneys know is never reported, and the novel is about what the silence does over the following years, as the family loses the business, the farm and the sense of itself that everyone had taken for granted. Oates tells the story through Judd, the youngest, and through the accounts of the others, so the reader sees the same events from several positions at once. The writing stays close to the interior lives of people who are arranging what happened into a shape they can live with.

It was adapted for television and chosen for a national reading club, and it remains one of the author's most widely read novels.