We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About 1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir
Review Karen Lehrman The New York Times Book Review Eloquent....Roiphe gives her memoir the dramatic vividness of a novel.Robert Taylor The Boston Globe Probing....Roiphe's [book] is an acute social history as well as a personal account.Peter Gay author of The Bourgeois Experience A marvelous, fascinating book....A horror story and a love story at the same time. Product Description 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. From the Back Cover 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. About the Author Anne Roiphe is the author of seven novels, including Up the Sandbox, Lovingkindness, and Fruitful; Living the Contradictions -- A Memoir of Modern Motherhood, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She lives in New York City. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1The NeighborhoodLater when we would drive in from our country house along Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx or out to visit a friend on Long Island and we'd drive through Queens, after tunnels or bridges, after streets of warehouses and factories smelling of glues and yeast, we'd pass the small two-family attached houses that lined the road before the city would slide into suburb. We'd see the striped awnings on each little brick house, the chairs on the porches where flowerpots vied for space with barbeque grills, the small iron gates, behind which blue and white painted statues of the Virgin watched as the cars going or coming from Manhattan flowed by. From rooftops Santa Claus sometimes waved and near the garage door ceramic spotted deer grazed on closet-sized lawns. My mother would be smoking, ashes falling in her lap, she would be sitting on a cushion so she could see over the driving wheel. She would be wearing her dark glasses to hide the puffiness of her eyes, the circles beneath them. She would drive slowly so she could look at the houses carefully. Cars would honk and pass and some would open their windows and yell at her. "Get a horse," "Woman drivers." Then my mother would sigh, a deep sigh, "If only your father and I lived in one of t
