Janet, My Mother, and Me: A Memoir of Growing Up with Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray (Hardcover)

by William Murray (Author) "The voices of grief haunt the early morning hours..." (more)
Key Phrases: fiction department, magazine assignments, New York, Mammina Ester, Cherry Grove (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
William Murray, a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than 30 years and author of more than 20 books, had the good fortune to be raised by a couple who loved one another intensely and doted on him completely. That the couple was composed of two remarkable and remarkably independent women who happened to be lovers didn't faze Murray in the least, despite the prevailing social winds of the '40s and '50s. That those two women were Natalia Danesi Murray (his mother) and Janet Flanner, The New Yorker's celebrated author of the "Letter from Paris" column, added indescribable richness to his life and helped inspire him towards his own career as a writer.

In this winning memoir, Murray narrates the life story of his mother (born in Rome, she would develop a diverse career that included freelance writer, radio broadcaster, actress, and publishing big wheel--a woman he describes as "an explosive force of nature"); his maternal grandmother, Mammina Ester (who lived with them and had herself been a journalistic and literary firebrand in Italy, and during WWI was the first Italian female war correspondent to ever visit a front); and Janet Flanner, who wrote under the pseudonym Genêt and was lauded in Mary McCarthy's elegy as a "first citizen and patron of the arts, with some mythic quality in her like a splendid sacred bird."

Murray tells his life story as well, growing up in New York and Italy, his life imbued with the fine arts of two cultures and the three women who raised him and molded him. His memoir is at once a movingly personal story, a revelation into the persona of three historic women, and an insight into how lesbians navigated their professional worlds and a disapproving society while maintaining a family life and a passion for one another. It's also a pleasant, gentle read, a story told in a genial tone about an earlier time. The individuals Murray describes are luminous personalities, and the reader feels privileged to share in their glow through the pages of this touching memoir. --Stephanie Gold

From Publishers Weekly
When Janet Flanner, the New Yorker's Paris correspondent from 1925 to 1975, met Natalia Danesi Murray, who was to become her lover of 38 years, Flanner's wit was so radiant that even Natalia's son, who was 14 in 1940, "lingered for nearly an hour just to be around her." Intertwined with Murray's memorable portrait of the two women is his own gently self-deprecating coming of age story. He emerges as a lusty, headstrong young fellow, forever resisting his deeply possessive Italian mother, yet profoundly shaped by her and the cultured life they shared. Pursuing what became a dead-end career as an opera singer, he found in Flanner both an ally who tempered his mother's persistent criticism and "a sort of surrogate father." His admiration for Flanner's writing was a beacon that lit his path: he became a New Yorker staff writer for 30 years and the author of numerous novels (A Fine Italian Hand, etc.) and plays. Murray's descriptions of Flanner's often piercing insecurities and her devotion to her work are fascinating and inspiring; his less loving portrait of New Yorker editor William Shawn adds chiaroscuro. Drawing on Flanner's hauntingly articulate letters to Natalia, who assumed a succession of broadcasting, film and publishing positions in Italy as well as New York, Murray deftly conveys the interplay of passion, need and resolute independence that brought out the best and worst in their long-distance relationship. Although Murray's portrait of Flanner is crisper than that of his mother-perhaps due to the loss of Natalia's letters as well as her son's lingering ambivalence-this is a stirring account of the mature and enduring love between a mother, her lover and her son. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition/First Printing edition (February 17, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684809664
• ISBN-13: 978-0684809663
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #640,264 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #42 in

  Books > Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs > Lesbian

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The company of three, March 15, 2000

By	Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

As warm as the Italy he loves,William Murray has written an incredibly beautiful tribute to his mother, Natalia Danesi Murray and her long-time companion, Janet Flanner. He explores their deep relationship with great care, keeping the focus on them as he adds his own experiences growing up and growing older with them. What a triumvirate this must have been! Murray succeeds where many authors fail in noble attempts at "family" biography....he keeps just the right perspective in telling their story as well as his own. He relates the anguish of both women who experienced long separations from each other over their 38-year relationship but tempers it with the joy that Natalia and Janet felt during their many months, then finally years, together. I am impressed that Murray doesn't get carried away with general philosophizing about Lesbian working women, especially at a time when homosexuality was at its nadir...he rather simply, elegantly, and with several dashes of humor, becomes the camera lens through which we are able to view their personal and professional sides, especially through Janet's many letters to Natalia. In the end, I feel as if I have known all three for a long time.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Letter from the Granddaughter, Natalia., March 29, 2000

By	Natalia - See all my reviews

It's probably not fair as in not being 'entirely impartial' of me to submit a review of this book, about my grandmother and written by my father but this is the internet so maybe all those rules can be broken. I think that this is the best book that my father has ever written. He has truly 'opened a vein' and allowed such deep emotion to flow in language that is beautifully written. I am sure that Janet and my grandmother would have been proud of him and very impressed with the accomplishment. I personally know what it cost him to create this work, the hours (writing still in longhand, mind you) to recreate the lives of those two amazing women. This book is truly a testament to the power of the love he has for them and the depth of emotion so expressed in the quality of the writing. My grandmother was an incredibly complex person. She was stern and critical yet also deeply loving, kind and generous. As a child sometimes she scared me but I always looked forward with excitment to her visits, she was never boring. Janet I remember as a wonderful, funny and warm, always correcting your grammer. At the end of my grandmother's life when she came to California, knowing that her life was nearly over, she tried one last time to 'protect' my father. This time it was his wife, Alice, scarcely mentioned in the book, that my grandmother attempted to save him from. The reader wonders (as noted in the NYTimes book review) between the lines what went on in that time period and that was basically it. My father was completely torn emotionally in that situation and was forced to choose. This book is a tribute to the way he really feels about his mother and about Janet. He misses them more than life itself and this is his special offering to their memory.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating memoir, August 19, 2000

By	Alekos (Cancun, Quintana Roo Mexico) - See all my reviews

As a New Englander of mixed Italian and English ancestry, I feel I can relate easily to William Murray's experience, even though the Italian ladies in my background were houswives and factory workers, and not the brilliant and accomplished sort of person his mother was. Natalia's relationship with Janet Flanner is interesting and shows her (Natalia's) deep sense of humanity and commitment as well as her strong nurturing capacities. Italian mothers always think they are right, and my own opinion is that they always are right. Murray emphasizes Flanner's virtues and other good points, but I wonder about why she was so incapable of sacrificing a little of her time, her career, her work for the woman who loved her and whom she said she loved.

By the time I finished reading this book, which is a very lovely memoir, I had really taken a strong liking to Natalia with her patience, tenderness, humanity, character, and love.