A Place in the Country [Hardcover]

Laura Shaine Cunningham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 22, 2000

The author of Sleeping Arrangements returns with this glorious account of ultimate urban fantasy--country living.

When it was published ten years ago, Laura Cunningham's Sleeping Arrangements, a loving tribute to her eccentric childhood in the "Babylonian Bronx" of the 1950s, was met with a veritable avalanche of praise. Anne Tyler, writing in The Baltimore Sun, called it "a truly wonderful book." The Wall Street Journal compared Cunningham to Truman Capote, and The New York Times praised it as "a model memoir...funny and sad, irreverent and generous."

A Place in the Country marks the welcome return of this beloved writer. Like an American A Year in Provence or Under the Tuscan Sun, this winning memoir speaks to the universal dream of escape, the yearning for what Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden called "a bit of earth." A Place in the Country describes Cunningham's transformation from urban dweller to country sophisticate and takes the reader from the cramped spaces of her Bronx youth to the rolling greenery of the upstate New York farm she eventually settles on.

Cunningham's negotiations with the land, the local gentry (English aristocrats, a swami and his followers, and dairy farmers, among others), and the wildlife (holsteins, deer, chickens, geese, snakes, and pigs) are related with acuity, novelistic grace, and wry humor. Along the way, we revel in some of the most evocative writing about place in recent memory. A Place in the Country is an immensely satisfying book that at once captures the rustic dreams of every city child and the poignant passing of the old-fashioned pastoral life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her well-received memoir, Sleeping Arrangements (1989), Cunningham chronicled her years growing up in the Bronx. Now, in a book dedicated to all the city people "who love nature with a passion that is near demented in its innocence," the playwright and journalist recounts a lifelong love of greenery, and the pleasure and frustration she has found living in the Shawangunk Mountains of New York. As a child, Cunningham and her unmarried mother, Rose, were often forced to share cramped apartments with relatives, though they dreamed of owning "a private home" in the country. Then, when Cunningham was eight, her mother died. Years later, as a young married woman, she rented a house in a suburb of New York. Although she reveled in easy access to forest and mountain, the gated community didn't satisfy Cunningham's fantasy of country life, and after some 10 years of searching, she found her dream house in the mountains. Adjacent to a working dairy farm, the Inn was part of a huge estate that a titled English couple were gradually selling off, although they remained as neighbors. Cunningham recounts with wry humor her conversion from innocent newcomer to country sophisticate, a process that included raising chickens (whose eggs, she figures, cost her $25 a dozen), feeding two ornery goats and tending an ill-fated garden. Her pastoral life has been interrupted by serious illness, counterbalanced by her joy in adopting her two little girls. She passes quickly over the breakup of her marriage and concludes by describing her uneasy adjustment to new neighborsAa swami and his followers. Throughout, Cunningham's lovely portrait of country scenes will engage readers who, like her, have dreamed of the glories of a rural retreat. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Cunningham's memoir, a case for creative nonfiction, embodies Robert Frost's remark that "locality gives art." Now a playwright and journalist whose fiction has been published in The New Yorker and elsewhere, she offers compelling descriptions of her childhood in the Bronx, of a first country home 40 miles north of the city in a gated community of rentals and, later, of a real home in the country surrounded by farmers, animals, and other eccentric life forms. Humor serves as a cornerstone of her well-crafted prose and provides a counterbalance to the sometimes serious experiences of a child, and then an adult, in search of a country home. This memoir draws you in as a novel might, capturing your interest with plot and charactersDCunningham's mother, Rosie; her uncles Len and Gabe, who become "guardians of her fate"; and an intriguing array of neighbors are well worth meeting. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.DSue Samson, Univ. of Montana Lib., Missoula
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; First Printing edition (June 22, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573221570
• ISBN-13: 978-1573221573
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,241,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laura Shaine Cunningham is the author of eight books, including the acclaimed memoirs, Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country which were first excerpted in The New Yorker magazine. She has also published the novels Sweet Nothings, Third Parties,Tamara (as L.C.Shaine), Beautiful Bodies, Dreams of Rescue and the YA novel The Midnight Diary of Zoya Blume. Her books have been published in ten foreign countries. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly and many literary quarterlies. She is also a playwright and her plays have been produced on the main stage at Steppenwolf Theater, on Theater Row in New York,also staged in Manhattan at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theater Club and Ensemble Studio Theatre and are extremely popular in Europe- she has many current international theater productions, in Russia, Bulgaria, Argentina, London, Estonia, Finland. Her plays are often anthologized and appear in many Best Plays of...including Best Plays of 2009-2010,Best Plays of 2007-8, and most preceding years' collections. In addition, her plays have been published in many Vintage collections, including Plays for Women, Leading Ladies, Take Ten, Take Ten II, Laugh Lines, Shorter, Faster, Funnier...and several of her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing- Beautiful Bodies, Bang, and Cruising Close to Crazy.
In addition, she is a journalist and has written many columns for The New York Times, The New York Observer, the London Times and magazine articles for Esquire, the Ladies Home Journal, Organic Living and other periodicals.She is also Artistic Director of the Memoir Institute ([e-mail], and lectures often on memoir and theater at universities and at literary festivals. She has won many awards for her writing, including two NEA Fellowships, in literature and theatre, and two NYFA awards in creative writing and play-writing. She is a member of HB Playwrights Foundation, and The Actors Studio Playwright Unit; she is also an alumna of New Dramatists. and Actors and Writers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A charming sequel to SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS, July 25, 2001

By 

Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: A Place in the Country (Paperback)

In SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS, author Laura Shaine Cunningham movingly remembered her life growing up in the Bronx with her single mother, Rosie, until the latter's untimely death, after which Laura's guardians were her mother's two odd-ball bachelor brothers, Len and Gabe.

A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY is essentially a sequel, wherein Ms. Cunningham describes her life from the mid-1950's to Y2K. Indeed, the first couple of chapters reprise events of her life with Rosie and her uncles - all in the context of explaining her developing love for "the country". This is not unexpected in someone who grew up in small, overcrowded, city apartments. Most of the book revolves around the two rural homes in which the author has spent a good portion of her adult life, the Castle and The Inn, the latter having been her abode away from The City for the last 18 years up to the present.

Laura's life has been, in many ways, perfectly ordinary - probably not so different from the general pattern of yours or mine. Perhaps that's why it's so appealing. (We have here not the memoir of an obnoxious diva, whining and overpaid sports figure, or dysfunctional actor.) The author's great ability in sharing is her gentle, wry sense of humor, whether it's telling us about the trials of converting an old underground cistern into a swimming pool, or starting an ill-conceived cottage industry in potpourri pillows, or battling the local fauna over home-grown tomatoes, or the adoption of her first daughter from Romania, or her second daughter from China, or learning the pitfalls inherent to raising chickens, geese and goats. For instance ...

"I spent most of my time preparing the alleged garden, jumping on the end of a pickaxe, trying to tilt the tip of what might be a glacial formation (of rock) that extends to the core of the earth. When at last there was a thin strip of what we could call soil, we stuck in seeds, which were instantly lost and unidentifiable except to the birds that snacked on them. We graduated immediately to seedlings that cost as much as the finished vegetables. In this way, we worked our way up, with credit cards, to the six-hundred dollar tomato."

Not all of Laura's life in the country has been happy. In the later chapters, when she tells of the eventual dissolution of her 27-year marriage, or the neighbors that move away, or die, or just her slide into middle-age, the tone of A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY becomes occasionally melancholic. ("Time is supposed to march on, but now it hurtles.") But, her narrative never loses the sensitivity and poignancy that conveys to the reader the fact that she is, from all evidence, a truly good human being giving Life her best shot. A person that it would be an honor to hug.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars country charm, July 10, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Place in the Country (Hardcover)

Delightful. Fix yourself some ice tea, put your feet up, and pretend that you are sitting among the foxglove and asters in a New England garden, even if you're stuck on the twentieth floor of a New York City high-rise. This is summer in the country as it should be. The pleasures of country life are so vivid, along with the absurdities, the weeds, the mud, the mosquitoes, and the contretemps that can only be dealt with by laughing, that you may be tempted to move to a small, rural village. Unless you happened to also read The Enduring Shore and have decided to move to a saltwater village on Cape Cod. Or to read Bullough's Pond and are looking for a small lake within commuting distance of Boston. Or, well, you could just check them all out of the library and put yor feet up. It's been a great season for books about New England.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thank God It's Not Tuscany, October 3, 2000

By 

helen verlander (Melbourne 3108, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Place in the Country (Hardcover)

Being one of those who thinks that Scarlett O'Hara was better off being left with Tara than with Rhett, I love accounts of finding property. Call it trying to find a life if you like because places do carry with them a particular lifestyle and different ways of seeing. Surely everyone has to be Tuscany-ed and Provenced out of their minds by now. After a while, they all start sounding like novelized versions of the Rough Guide to Europe or somesuch. So this account of a young woman from the Bronx improbably finding her place in the country, a rambling early nineteenth century house called The Inn, is a breath of fresh Atlantic air. But it goes way beyond the tourism of so many other accounts about buying houses, invariably set in Europe, because it delineates a whole life, beginning with a young child's weekend outings looking at real estate with her romantic mother while living in cramped quarters in various relatives' houses, including for some time under an aunt's dining table. What befalls the estate of which The Inn is a part reminded me of a child's story book which shows a pretty country house in the middle of verdant green pastures which is absorbed over time into part of the suburban spread. The Inn and I think its thirteen acres have not yet come to this but the fate of the Lord and Lady of the local manor house and of the farmer's family make this more than some unreal paean to rustic charm. The lights from the local downmarket university campus and the creeping shopping malls are not far away. This is a lovely and lyrical account of finding one's true home and Cunningham's delight in it, notably her love of the dancing cows and their tinkling bells, is infectious.