Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Wendy Burden (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 1, 2010

In the tradition of Sean Wilsey's Oh The Glory of It All and Augusten Burrough's Running With Scissors, the great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt gives readers a grand tour of the world of wealth and WASPish peculiarity, in her irreverent and darkly humorous memoir.

For generations the Burdens were one of the wealthiest families in New York, thanks to the inherited fortune of Cornelius "The Commodore" Vanderbilt. By 1955, the year of Wendy's birth, the Burden's had become a clan of overfunded, quirky and brainy, steadfastly chauvinistic, and ultimately doomed bluebloods on the verge of financial and moral decline-and were rarely seen not holding a drink. In Dead End Gene Pool, Wendy invites readers to meet her tragically flawed family, including an uncle with a fondness for Hitler, a grandfather who believes you can never have enough household staff, and a remarkably flatulent grandmother.

At the heart of the story is Wendy's glamorous and aloof mother who, after her husband's suicide, travels the world in search of the perfect sea and ski tan, leaving her three children in the care of a chain- smoking Scottish nanny, Fifth Avenue grandparents, and an assorted cast of long-suffering household servants (who Wendy and her brothers love to terrorize). Rife with humor, heartbreak, family intrigue, and booze, Dead End Gene Pool offers a glimpse into the fascinating world of old money and gives truth to an old maxim: The rich are different.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Burden offers up her version of growing up Vanderbilt in this amusing, often-heartbreaking, poor-little-rich-girl tale. As the great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Burden experienced a childhood populated by a cast of suitably wacky WASPs, whose personal and professional ambitions had progressively declined over the course of several overindulged and dangerously inbred generations. Born in 1955, she and her brothers spent their kaleidoscopic childhood raised by rich, eccentric grandparents, Gaga and Popsie, and an extensive surrogate family of servants, while their jet-setting mother—strangely liberated by their father’s suicide—galloped around the globe, gin in hand, desperately seeking her next husband and the perfect tan. This blueblood tale is spun so deftly and so charmingly that it is easy to forget that this it is essentially a sad story of family neglect and degeneration. Burden joins the ranks of such memoirists as Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris, who have successfully mined their dysfunctional childhoods for comedic gold. --Margaret Flanagan

Review

"In this dark and humorous memoir Wendy Burden takes us inside the family circus that was her side of the Vanderbilt dynasty, bringing American class structure, sibling rivalry and the decline of the bluebloods vividly to life. It is a wonderful read."
-Gus Van Sant

"Charles Addams meets Carrie Bradshaw in this honest, sardonic, and touching memoir. Burden's tale makes for riveting and often hilarious reading."
-Jane Stanton Hitchcock, New York Times bestselling author of Social Crimes and Mortal Friends

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Gotham; First Edition edition (April 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592405266
• ISBN-13: 978-1592405268
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #268,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The great-great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt Wendy Burden is a former illustrator, zoo keeper, taxidermist, owner and chef of the bistro Chez Wendy, and served as the art director of a pornographic magazine-from which she was fired for being too tasteful.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 58 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The rich really aren't that different after all April 11, 2010

By E. Jacobs TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

This is a tough book for me to review because I enjoyed a lot of the anecdotes, but perhaps more since they invoked some nostalgia on my part than for the humor that seemed to be the lynchpin on which the marketing of the book was based. In other words, I was expecting a different book from the one that I read, but it was still a good book.

I fully agree with another reviewer who said she didn't find the book all that humorous; I really didn't, either. The interest for me was in the personal feelings of a girl who is growing up--the sibling rivalry, the Christmastime anticipation and the big reveal that Santa doesn't exist, the way her family interacted with one another. All of this really rang true to me, and if you take away the trappings a lot of Ms. Burden's experiences are universal. That, to me, was the appeal of the book, along with a few delicious bon mots about the Vanderbilts and a description of some of the family houses, which sent me off on a Googling frenzy to see what they looked like.

The shortcomings of the book were that in some places, the pacing did fall off quite a bit. Some of the stories just weren't that interesting, and the way they were put together was choppy at times. In addition, the book could have used a better editor; a number of typos and grammatical errors made it through to the final version.

To me this book was very reminiscent of A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle by Liza Campbell. The two women shared a very similar upbringing and experiences; however, the book by Campbell was in my opinion the better read of the two. In summary, the book was entertaining but uneven. The way it was marketed (humor! scandal!) doesn't match up with what, to me, was appealing about the story, which was the universal experiences of growing up.

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting detail but it didn't hold together April 18, 2010

By Book lover -Philadelphia

Format:Hardcover

First, Wendy Burden has extraordinary recall of the details of her childhood. Mine was far less eventful, and much more normal, so my own memories are scarce. Her life, and the lives of her great- and grandparents were pretty extraordinary - not least the autocratic way in which her grandfather would simply order two dozen grouse from Scotland for dinner the next night, with no consideration whatsoever for the cost or trouble to others. Or the fact that so many alcoholics lived such long lives...
Second, the level of money seems to be inversely proportional to any maternal or paternal feeling. It's rather as if the Burden children raised themselves, and not so successfully.
Third, the book suffers from a lack of organization and insight. Stories about the grandparents are scattered throughout the book, along with stories about Wendy's mother - with no coherent time line. Plus, the author is now an adult but seems to have absolutely no insight about what things from her past might really mean, using an adult understanding.
I didn't find this to be a great read but it was an interesting book to skim.

51 of 62 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A triumph of humor and compassion over privilege and bitterness April 7, 2010

By Jesse Kornbluth TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

The trick to money is to have a lot, but not too much.

What's too much?

I could tell you --- I was once married to the daughter of the second or third richest woman in America --- but you probably wouldn't believe me. Better that you find out for yourself. Just start accumulating wealth. When you have enough, you'll feel great. When you have too much, some new friends --- gloom, anxiety and a nasty sense of meaninglessness --- will show up, and never leave. Guaranteed.

Speaking of misery, let's consider the heritage of Cornelius Vanderbilt, in his day the richest man in America. (Here's just one of his estates.) Wendy Burden is his great-great-great granddaughter. It is astonishing, given her bloodline, that she could pull herself together enough to write Dead End Gene Pool. It's even more astonishing that she's alive.

When Wendy was six, her father killed himself. After that, she writes, "I only spent time with my mother when she was getting ready to leave. My brother and I had recently come to view her as a glamorous lodger who rented the master bedroom suite."

It would be easy to write this memoir from the Valley of Bitterness --- but then you'd have to live there. Wendy Burden chooses to reside on the Mountain of Absurdity. Smart move. Why waste energy on hating your mother when you can rip off lines like this, about Leslie Lepington Hamilton Burden dropping her young daughter at the airport and fleeing the jurisdiction: "She could make it downtown to Trader Vic's in less time than it takes to put on a pair of sheer black stockings and get the seams straight."

So Wendy and her brothers fell, by default, into the care of their grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. William A.M. Burden II. He had been a successful investor, Ambassador to Belgium (oh, how he craved the post in Paris) and President of the Museum of Modern Art. But "Popsie" and "Gaga" were not exactly homey --- their Fifth Avenue apartment had 14 bathrooms and 21 rooms. The Burdens were ghosts; only their "servants" seemed real.

Bill Burden had a breakthrough art collection. His wife "was a modern woman only when it came to self-medication." By the time Wendy showed up, their marriage consisted of gallons of wine, rich meals, afternoon naps, cocktails and dinner parties. William Burden's favorite word: Mah-velous. Really? You'll decide for yourself.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Wendy and her brother filled the absence of adult supervision with an unending series of pranks. They were, by turns, destructive, cruel, stupid and funny. I lump them all into another category: life-saving.

When you pass unseen through rooms, it's hard not to work at what Erik Erikson called "negative identity" --- "the sum of all those identifications and identity fragments which the individual had to submerge in himself as undesirable or irreconcilable." Mooning boaters who have slowed their engines to gawk at the Burdens house in Maine, stealing every bit of food from the kitchen, stretching Saran Wrap under the toilet seat --- the young Burdens did it all. Do I have to add that Wendy also got terrible grades in school?

Even if you're not of her world, you'll guffaw at the descriptions of meals in Maine and vacations in Florida. Her mother's marital history is a kind of hoot. Wendy's first crush and her efforts to lose her virginity are damn funny. To say nothing of Jacques Cousteau putting the moves on teenage Wendy on the Concorde. And the descriptions of a great meal: "It was sublime, like eating orgasms."

Take the laughs where you can get them, because you knew where this book is going --- adult diapers for William Burden, rehab for Wendy's brothers, more inappropriate marriages for her mother. By the end, if you're like me, you'll find Wendy's survival nothing short of remarkable. And you'll be glad she heads out into her adult life only kinda-sorta rich.