1185 Park Avenue
1185 Park Avenue: a memoir Anne Roiphe
Publisher: New York : Free Press, c1999.
ISBN: 0684857316
DDC: 813.54
Summary:
In this memoir, novelist Anne Roiphe shows us what it was really like
to grow up rich and Jewish in New York in the 1940s and 1950s.
Revisiting the world of her childhood, Roiphe brings alive a cast of
characters who are both difficult to love and impossible to forget.
Through the eyes of this precocious, loving daughter, we witness the
brutalities that lurked behind the mah-jongg tables, cocktail
parties, and summer houses of her family.
By turns heartbreaking, funny, and mercilessly honest, Roiphe's story
exposes the fault lines of misery that exploded in domestic battles
on the home front, far overshadowing the war overseas.
The locus of the story is 1185 Park Avenue. Amidst the maids and the
governesses and the doormen and the psychiatrists live the members of
the Roth family, in Apartment 8C.
They include an unfaithful father who uses his wife's fortune to
entertain other women and play cards at his club; a misfit son who
won't eat his food because he believes his parents are trying to
poison him; a disappointed mother who waits all day for her five
o'clock scotch and her crossword puzzle; and an eager daughter who
tries to negotiate peace at the dinner table. Bound by custom and
greed, as well as love, they stay together until their world at 1185
Park has done its damage.
Only the daughter escapes whole - to become the writer we now know as
Anne Roiphe.
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