1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir
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1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir Overview
From National Book Award nominee Anne Roiphe comes this moving memoir of growing up in a wealthy Jewish home with a family who had money, status, culture -- everything but happiness.
While the nation was at war abroad, Roiphe, who was coming of age in 1940s New York City, saw her parents at war in their living room. Roiphe's evocative writing puts readers right in Apartment 8C, where a constant tension plays out between a disappointed and ineffectual mother, a philandering father who uses his wife's money to entertain other women, and a difficult brother. Behind the leisure culture of wealthy Jewish society -- the mahjongg games, the cocktail parties, the summer houses -- lurks a brutality that strikes a chord with a daughter who longs to heal the wounds of her troubled family.
Writing with a novelist's sensibility, Roiphe reveals the poignant story of a family that has finally claimed its material wealth in a prosperous America but has yet to claim its spiritual due.
1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir Feature
- ISBN13: 9780684857329
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"He married her because she was rich" is the author's bleak assessment of her handsome, unfaithful father's relationship with her unhappy, insecure mother. Anne Roiphe describes with equally brutal candor a childhood largely spent with the governess until she was old enough to mix her mother's drinks, light cigarettes, and listen to complaints about her father. In this grim environment, Roiphe and her sickly younger brother did not band together so much as coexist in mutual misery. She seems to find redemption in the trio of deaths that close the book. Her parents died from cancer; her father disinherited his children in favor of his second wife. Her brother, a doctor infected with AIDS from cutting himself in his lab, ordered a funeral without any words: "The God who would do this to him deserved only silence." So why read this angst fest? Because Roiphe is just as honest about her own efforts to escape her gilded cage on New York's Upper East Side, and because she captures the social and historical particulars of wealthy Jewish American life from the 1930s on in the same richly textured detail she brought to feminist classics like Up the Sandbox. "I am a writer, and burning bridges behind me is part of the cost of the work," she comments. She burns them with sorrowful panache in this chilling, engrossing memoir. --Wendy Smith
