From Publishers Weekly
When a never-mailed love letter from her first husband, writer James Agee, reached Neuman in 1978--some 20 years after his death and almost 40 years after their divorce--she decided to "answer" by penning her memoirs. A musician and artist, Neuman (1913-1988) describes an adolescence she spent trying to overcome feelings of inferiority, which she believes stemmed from growing up Jewish in a WASPy upstate New York environment. More interesting are her struggles to lead a bohemian life with Agee after the birth of their son, when motherhood did not excuse her from deferring to her charming but self-centered husband's every whim. Leaving Agee, she became part of the expatriate community in 1940s Mexico City, where she married Bodo Uhse, a German writer and a Communist, and became acquainted with Diego Rivera and Pablo Neruda. By the '50s, she and Uhse had moved to East Germany; by the '60s, she had left Uhse and returned to New York. Although grieving over the suicide of her schizophrenic youngest son and the death of her third husband five months later, Neuman expresses a continued hunger for experience. An engrossing story. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this memoir, the second wife of writer James Agee chronicles a life often marked by shocking events. The narrative opens in the 1930s as Neuman, a Jewish 16-year-old, is taken in hand by a Protestant family, lives through the deaths of her brother and mother, then begins a bohemian life as the lover and later the wife of Agee, whom she leaves after he has an affair during her first pregnancy. In Mexico, Neuman becomes the wife of Bodo Uhse, an exiled German Communist, with whom she returns to the newly created East Germany at World War II's end. A brief epilog chronicles her experiences after she leaves Uhse at age 46 to return to the United States. Given the upheavals she experienced, Neuman's narrative is surprisingly dispassionate; she seems oddly unaffected by both personal and political events, and her lack of reflection detracts from what might have been a rich autobiography.
- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
