1185 Park Avenue [Hardcover]

Anne Roiphe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 1999

Anne Roiphe's acclaimed chronicles of women's lives, from Up the Sandbox in 1969 to the 1996 National Book Award finalist Fruitful, come full circle with 1185 Park Avenue. Here is the story of how she and her brother grew up in a battlefield called home, with a distant, philandering father and a pampered, ineffectual mother.

Roiphe brilliantly dramatizes 1940s-1950s male-female relationships in her sad but loving remembrance of her parents' troubled marriage, held together by convention and money. Their clashes dwarfed the war in Europe and scarred her fragile, talented brother for life. Her novelist's pen evokes a New York where trains pulse beneath stately upper Park Avenue, and assimilated Jewish families inhabit a world of gloved doormen, Mah Jong, music tutors, and spartan governesses. Yet like Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, this eloquent and sensitive memoir transcends its setting and will resonate in the heart of anyone who has felt the turmoil it depicts. We are stunned and thrilled as Roiphe finally escapes the icy grip of 1185 Park Avenue, finding her own redemption as a writer and the mother of a happy family.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"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

From Publishers Weekly

A noted author of fiction (her 1970 Up the Sandbox was a landmark portrayal of women's motherhood and career conflicts) as well as nonfiction (Fruitful was a 1996 National Book Award finalist), Roiphe recalls growing up in a loveless household marked by petty bitterness and fueled by murderous rage. Outwardly, it was a world of privilege, endowed by the fortune of Israel Phillips, her maternal grandfather, the founder of the Phillips Van Heusen shirt company. The family's wealth attracted a tall, handsome husband for Israel's daughter Blanche, but the union was miserable. Anne's mother was prey to neurotic insecurities that were resistant to lifelong psychiatric counseling, and she became a chain-smoking semi-invalid. Like her philandering husband, Blanche displayed little interest in the children, who were consigned to the care of a stern German governess. In this surprising and gripping memoir, Roiphe unflinchingly describes her savage jealousy at the birth of her brother and the anger that always underlay their relationship. Her extended family circle included Roy Cohn, whose attempt to fix Anne up for a blind date with his colleague David Schine's younger brother provides one of the book's lighter moments. She describes with telling detail her passage to adulthood, but the story of her inner journeyAhow she managed to escape the destructive atmosphere of her home and become a celebrated novelist and criticA remains a puzzle. Nevertheless Roiphe's devastating memoir fully engages the reader in her painful story of hatred and betrayal.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (May 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684857316
• ISBN-13: 978-0684857312
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,175,936 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Long Day's Journey into Night "in rich New York Jews, April 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: 1185 Park Avenue (Hardcover)

This is Anne Roiphe`s memoir of growing up in the 40's and 50's in a wealthy, squalid family.Roiphe has mined this territory in earlier books. Again she offers personal and political gossip (social history, if you will) against a background of local and world history. But here there is more: a cry from the heart. Father is savage and physically absent. Mother is self centered and incompetent. Treachery and betrayal abound. Attended by an army of maids, governesses, nurses, doctors, and psychoanalysts, she, her younger Brother and the others survive for a while but at a price. In the end, only she remains. This is a ruthless, forgiving, brilliant book.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A most brilliant memoir., July 23, 2000

By 

One Fancy Angel "Life-Lover" (Milwaukee) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: 1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir (Paperback)

When I began the first few pages of this book, on a sleepless night, I prepared to be bored by what, at first glance, seemed to be flowery language with no sweat shed.

How wrong I was. Roiphe has written the best memoir I have ever encountered. Each character is so well described that I swear I could pick any one of them out in a crowd, regardless of whether they are now dead or alive. I normally have some distaste for changes in tense, but Roiphe achieves this so artfully, I rarely noticed.

Roiphe, though her descriptions are vivid and not in any sense concise, does not waste a word. I sometimes found myself unexpectedly laughing, and at one point, incredibly, weeping. Her analogies, her descriptions, her words....all are just remarkably brilliant. I will never be able to forget her family anymore than Roiphe herself will. Her talent is nearly incredible.

Even when Roiphe is at her most descriptive, the reader is so present in this memoir, as if we are standing slightly to the side of Roiphe,, at her elbow, throughout the entire book. We understand everything.

I couldn't recommend a memoir more highly than I do this one, and at that, I couldn't recommend any book more highly than I do this one. I've found a new favorite.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Under My Skin, July 7, 2000

By 

JEG (LIC, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir (Paperback)

This memoir got under my skin. I finished it a few days ago and I'm still thinking about it. Anne Roiphe's family seem monstrous and she doesn't always spare herself. I felt tremendous pity for her and her brother -- what could have become of such an intelligent, sensitive man if he hadn't been treated so badly as a child? I recently read Mary Karr's memoir of growing up in East Texas with poor and dysfunctional, but loving parents. It makes an interesting counterpoint to Anne Roiphe's rich, but cold family.