Borrowed Finery: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Paula Fox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2001

An exotic, heartbreaking memoir that should finally earn Paula Fox, a distinguished novelist and children's book writer, the audience she has for decades deserved

Paula Fox has long been acclaimed as one of America's most brilliant fiction writers. Borrowed Finery, her first book in nearly a decade, is an astonishing memoir of her highly unusual beginnings.

Born in the twenties to nomadic, bohemian parents, Fox is left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage, then cared for by a poor yet cultivated minister in upstate New York. Her parents, however, soon resurface. Her handsome father is a hard-drinking screenwriter who is, for young Paula, "part ally, part betrayer." Her mother is given to icy bursts of temper that punctuate a deep indifference. How, Fox wonder, is this woman "enough of an organic being to have carried me in her belly"?

Never sharing more than a few moments with his daughter, Fox's father allows her to be shunted from New York City, where she lives with her passive Spanish grandmother, to Cuba, where she roams freely on a relative's sugar-cane plantation, to California, where she finds herself cast upon Hollywood's grubby margins. The thread binding these wanderings is the "borrowed finery" of the title-a few pieces of clothing, almost always lent by kind-hearted strangers, that offer Fox a rare glimpse of permanency.

Vivid and poetic, Borrowed Finery is an unforgettable book which will swell the legions of Paula Fox's devoted admiriers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this elegant, wrenching memoir, Paula Fox looks at her childhood with the same detached acceptance of life's arbitrary cruelties that informs such acclaimed novels as Desperate Characters. Born in 1923, she was abandoned at a Manhattan foundling home by her alcoholic father at the insistence of her panic-stricken, 19-year-old mother. Paul and Elsie Fox were in no way prepared to take on the responsibility of a child, although they couldn't leave her alone either. Fox's austere narrative unflinchingly describes the couple swooping down on their daughter, who was being raised in upstate New York by a kindly minister, for visits that were as alarming as they were intermittent. For reasons best known to themselves (Fox does not attempt to analyze their motives), they removed her from the minister's home when she was 6, then bounced her among relatives, schools, and their own disordered care for the next 12 years, from Hollywood and Long Island to Cuba and Montreal. The restraint with which Fox describes these traumas is a reproach to all those maudlin memoirs of family dysfunction that have been so prevalent in recent years. She demonstrates that you can write about painful experiences honestly without wallowing in self-pity, and her prose here is as perfectly calibrated as it is in her novels. Thank goodness that this sad story is leavened by a running counterpoint of short passages showing young Paula discovering the pleasure of words and the power of literature. Though she too had an unwanted baby at an early age, the book closes with a moving scene of the author's reunion with the daughter she gave up for adoption. --Wendy Smith

From Library Journal

In her first memoir, accomplished novelist and children's book author Fox (Desperate Characters) recounts the chaotic and often traumatic circumstances of her childhood. With parents too unstable and self-absorbed to care for her, she was shuffled from doorstep to boarding school, from New York to Cuba to Montreal. "By chance, by good fortune, I had landed in the hands of a fire brigade that passed me along from person to person until I was safe," she writes. The first rescuer was the Rev. Elwood Corning, or, as she fondly refers to him, Uncle Elwood, the "rock of ages." From there, her childhood was a roller coaster ride of uncertainty. Brief periods of living with her parents were painful and confusing. Her mother was like a cyclone of contempt, and her father, despite his affection, was too feeble to shield her. Fox tells her stories with no trace of self-pity. Her style is honest without being laborious, and her recollections bear the unmistakable mark of uncontrived innocence. Highly recommended for public libraries. Stephanie Maher, Warwick, RI
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (October 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805068155
• ISBN-13: 978-0805068153
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #495,842 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brave and elegant account of Ms. Fox's unhappy childhood, October 15, 2002

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (Hardcover)

In the unhappy-childhood sweepstakes, practically everyone I know is a contender. My father ran off with a neighbor when I was 14. My mother drank. This friend was beaten. That one was sexually abused. It's a wonder we all made it to adulthood. But we did, and with a sense of ourselves that may be keener because of the pain we grew up with. Kids who are hurt become, inevitably, observers --- they must master their feelings, anticipate attacks, live with abandonment. They must see clearly.

This Paula Fox does, without self-pity and with enormous elegance and understatement. In BORROWED FINERY, the story of the first 20-odd years of her life, she shows us pathological parents, remote from the normal pathways of love: She was barely allowed to be a child at all, in the ordinary sense of being nourished and cared for. It is her mother and father who are the kids in this book: a reckless, feckless, quick-witted, handsome, and thoroughly self-destructive pair. Having abandoned Fox at birth, they proceeded to waltz in and out of her life --- never really taking responsibility, but not letting her forget them, either.

Fox's parents did not hit or rape or starve her. They simply weren't interested and were not often present. And their behavior, when they were there, was so antiparental (unparental is not strong enough) that it boggles the mind: Upon hearing Fox observe that her room-service tray had no milk on it, her father threw the dinner out of the window. She went to bed hungry. He borrowed (and never repaid) fifty dollars from her when she was 11 or 12 and took back a typewriter he'd just given her. Her mother once "fixed" Fox's toothache by taking her on a terrifying car ride through the mountains.

One is appalled but fascinated and grateful that Fox wasn't relegated entirely to the world of orphanages and foster care. "By chance, by good fortune, I had landed in the hands of rescuers," she writes, "a fire brigade that passed me along from person to person until I was safe." The first and foremost of these was "Uncle Elwood," a Congregational minister who, out of the goodness of his heart (they were not related), took care of Fox in her early years, making room for her "real" parents from time to time. They lived in a town called, unbelievably and aptly, Balmville. "I would have been one of those children found in a wilderness, written about in case histories, if it had not been for Uncle Elwood," Fox writes; "I had learned civility and kindness from him."

After that sanctuary ended, her life morphed into a crazy-quilt of hand-me-down clothes and serial schools and temporary arrangements --- trains not met, bills not paid, affection not given. The cast of adult characters was always shifting, and no one seems to have been entirely in charge. Maybe that's why Fox's chapter headings are place names, not people: Hollywood and New Hampshire, Long Island and New York City, Florida and Montreal. In a way, she brought herself up. Forced to assess what each person or relative would be to her and learn --- yet again --- how to fend for herself in every new situation, Fox became an expert at uncertainty: "I knew how to behave in parlous circumstances, to temporize and compromise, a lesson taught me by my father." Her father, a screenwriter, also passed on book lore, taught her to swim (cruelly) and drive (patiently). "I had begun...to notice an impulse in him --- noble, he would have called it in someone else --- to teach," Fox writes. But his "servitude to alcohol" got in the way.

Fox gives her readers enough time-and-place markers to know when and where we are, but her book isn't a saga heavy with detail and rich in long, rolling sentences. It is a montage of scenes and epiphanies, as if portions of her past had suddenly been made visible by a flash of lightning, and the writing is vivid and precise and spare. On her first meeting with her father, at the age of four or five: "The word father was outlandish. It held an ominous note. I was transfixed by it. It was as though I had emerged from a dark wood into the sudden glare of headlights." And at the other end of the book, as she struggles with adulthood, "My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth."

It is taking nothing away from Fox's originality to say that BORROWED FINERY is strikingly Dickensian: her abandonment as a baby, not to mention the array of eccentrics --- Uncle Elwood could have walked straight out of David Copperfield, name and all --- who rescued and rejected her. And there is a twisty, almost Victorian symmetry in the final chapter (the surprise is too good to give away), where Fox defies her chaotic upbringing and reasserts a sense of family. Like Dickens, who also had an abysmal childhood, she not only has moral intelligence, but she knows how to tell a hell of a good story.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars best book in years, April 20, 2002

By 

"lizbeth53" (Newark, New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (Hardcover)

I had never even heard of this author and a friend was reading it at work and couldnt put it down. Immediately I was taken over by the story and her writing which made me feel I was right there living and experiencing what life was like for her.Her characters are so true and she writes with such honesty and wonderful description. I ended up ordering every other book she has written for adults and then when I asked other people about her it seems the whole world has read Paula Fox and loved her work except for me. IM so glad to have discovered her and reading her memoir makes reading her other books even more special.Even Oprah recommended her. I just keep passing Borrowed Finery on to everyone I know and so far they have had the same reactions as I have. I think this book should win alot of awards.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exellent and evocative, March 5, 2002

By 

J. Rosenberg "reggieroy" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Amazon reviewers who didn't like this book, didn't get it. It's not supposed to be a deep character study or a search for reasons and answers. It is an evocation of a child's life, bits and pieces she remembers because of their impact. I think it was beautifully written. That the parents were irresponsible is without question, but finding out why they were or how they should have been punished isn't the point.