1185 Park Avenue (Electronic book text)

Anne Roiphe's acclaimed chronicles of women's lives, from Up the Sandbox in 1969 to the 1996 National Book Award finalist Fruitful, come full circle with 1185 Park Avenue. Here is the story of how she and her brother grew up in a battlefield called home, with a distant, philandering father and a pampered, ineffectual mother.

Roiphe brilliantly dramatizes 1940s-1950s male-female relationships in her sad but loving remembrance of her parents' troubled marriage, held together by convention and money. Their clashes dwarfed the war in Europe and scarred her fragile, talented brother for life. Her novelist's pen evokes a New York where trains pulse beneath stately upper Park Avenue, and assimilated Jewish families inhabit a world of gloved doormen, Mah Jong, music tutors, and spartan governesses. Yet like Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, this eloquent and sensitive memoir transcends its setting and will resonate in the heart of anyone who has felt the turmoil it depicts. We are stunned and thrilled as Roiphe finally escapes the icy grip of 1185 Park Avenue, finding her own redemption as a writer and the mother of a happy family.