Author: Tess Guinery
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1524870412
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
What started as a break from Australian artist Tess Guinery’s rapidly growing design business turned into an instinctive, playful experiment with words, colors, and sounds—and eventually into a tangible book, The Apricot Memoirs. This collection of poetry and prose, thoughtfully illustrated and printed on colored paper, is infused with grace and playfulness. It explores love, personal growth, creativity, spirituality, vulnerability, and motherhood in the art medium of words, all the while creating a rich portrait of a deeply empathetic, talented, and whimsical artist. Esoteric, mysterious, and unfailingly beautiful, The Apricot Memoirs is an invitation to dig deep, embrace the uncomfortable, and free your creativity, unbound.
The Apricot Memoirs
Author: Tess Guinery
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1524870412
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
What started as a break from Australian artist Tess Guinery’s rapidly growing design business turned into an instinctive, playful experiment with words, colors, and sounds—and eventually into a tangible book, The Apricot Memoirs. This collection of poetry and prose, thoughtfully illustrated and printed on colored paper, is infused with grace and playfulness. It explores love, personal growth, creativity, spirituality, vulnerability, and motherhood in the art medium of words, all the while creating a rich portrait of a deeply empathetic, talented, and whimsical artist. Esoteric, mysterious, and unfailingly beautiful, The Apricot Memoirs is an invitation to dig deep, embrace the uncomfortable, and free your creativity, unbound.
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1524870412
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
What started as a break from Australian artist Tess Guinery’s rapidly growing design business turned into an instinctive, playful experiment with words, colors, and sounds—and eventually into a tangible book, The Apricot Memoirs. This collection of poetry and prose, thoughtfully illustrated and printed on colored paper, is infused with grace and playfulness. It explores love, personal growth, creativity, spirituality, vulnerability, and motherhood in the art medium of words, all the while creating a rich portrait of a deeply empathetic, talented, and whimsical artist. Esoteric, mysterious, and unfailingly beautiful, The Apricot Memoirs is an invitation to dig deep, embrace the uncomfortable, and free your creativity, unbound.
The Gospel of Trees
Author: Apricot Irving
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1451690460
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
In an “eye-opening memoir” (People) “as beautiful as it is discomfiting” (The New Yorker), award-winning writer Apricot Irving untangles her youth on a missionary compound in Haiti. Apricot Irving grew up as a missionary’s daughter in Haiti. Her father was an agronomist, a man who hiked alone into the deforested hills to preach the gospel of trees. Her mother and sisters spent their days in the confines of the hospital compound they called home. As a child, this felt like paradise to Irving; as a teenager, it became a prison. Outside of the walls of the missionary enclave, Haiti was a tumult of bugle-call bus horns and bicycles that jangled over hard-packed dirt, road blocks and burning tires triggered by political upheaval, the clatter of rain across tin roofs, and the swell of voices running ahead of the storm. Poignant and explosive, Irving weaves a portrait of a missionary family that is unflinchingly honest: her father’s unswerving commitment to his mission, her mother’s misgivings about his loyalty, the brutal history of colonization. Drawing from research, interviews, and journals—her parents’ as well as her own—this memoir in many voices evokes a fractured family finding their way to kindness through honesty. Told against the backdrop of Haiti’s long history of intervention, it grapples with the complicated legacy of those who wish to improve the world, while bearing witness to the defiant beauty of an undefeated country. A lyrical meditation on trees and why they matter, loss and privilege, love and failure. The Gospel of Trees is a “lush, emotional debut...A beautiful memoir that shows how a family altered by its own ambitious philanthropy might ultimately find hope in their faith and love for each other, and for Haiti.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1451690460
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
In an “eye-opening memoir” (People) “as beautiful as it is discomfiting” (The New Yorker), award-winning writer Apricot Irving untangles her youth on a missionary compound in Haiti. Apricot Irving grew up as a missionary’s daughter in Haiti. Her father was an agronomist, a man who hiked alone into the deforested hills to preach the gospel of trees. Her mother and sisters spent their days in the confines of the hospital compound they called home. As a child, this felt like paradise to Irving; as a teenager, it became a prison. Outside of the walls of the missionary enclave, Haiti was a tumult of bugle-call bus horns and bicycles that jangled over hard-packed dirt, road blocks and burning tires triggered by political upheaval, the clatter of rain across tin roofs, and the swell of voices running ahead of the storm. Poignant and explosive, Irving weaves a portrait of a missionary family that is unflinchingly honest: her father’s unswerving commitment to his mission, her mother’s misgivings about his loyalty, the brutal history of colonization. Drawing from research, interviews, and journals—her parents’ as well as her own—this memoir in many voices evokes a fractured family finding their way to kindness through honesty. Told against the backdrop of Haiti’s long history of intervention, it grapples with the complicated legacy of those who wish to improve the world, while bearing witness to the defiant beauty of an undefeated country. A lyrical meditation on trees and why they matter, loss and privilege, love and failure. The Gospel of Trees is a “lush, emotional debut...A beautiful memoir that shows how a family altered by its own ambitious philanthropy might ultimately find hope in their faith and love for each other, and for Haiti.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
The Moonflower Monologues
Author: Tess Guinery
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1524876356
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
From celebrated Australian artist Tess Guinery comes The Moonflower Monologues, her second book of beautifully designed poetry and prose. This collection is many things: an exploration of strength and femininity, an invitation to let things go wrong, a reminder that growth comes in many forms, and an acknowledgment that “some things can’t be written in sugar, only salt.” Some of the writings are extravagant, some are sparse, but all are infused with Guinery’s introspection, stillness, and kindness.
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1524876356
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
From celebrated Australian artist Tess Guinery comes The Moonflower Monologues, her second book of beautifully designed poetry and prose. This collection is many things: an exploration of strength and femininity, an invitation to let things go wrong, a reminder that growth comes in many forms, and an acknowledgment that “some things can’t be written in sugar, only salt.” Some of the writings are extravagant, some are sparse, but all are infused with Guinery’s introspection, stillness, and kindness.
Apricots on the Nile
Author: Colette Rossant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416591273
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 169
Book Description
Cairo, 1937: French-born Colette Rossant is waiting out World War II among her father's Egyptian-Jewish relatives. From the moment she arrives at her grandparents' belle époque mansion by the Nile, the five-year-old Colette finds companionship and comfort among the other "outsiders" in her home away from home -- the cooks and servants in the kitchen. The chef, Ahmet, lets Colette taste the ful; she learns how to make sambusaks for her new friends; and she shops for semits and other treats in the Khan-al-Khalili market. Colette is beginning to understand how her family's culture is linked to the kitchen...and soon she will claim Egypt's food, landscape, and people as her own. Apricots on the Nile is a loving testament to Colette's adopted homeland. With dozens of original recipes and family photographs, Colette's coming-of-age memoir is a splendid exploration of old Cairo in all its flavor, variety, and wide-eyed wonder.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416591273
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 169
Book Description
Cairo, 1937: French-born Colette Rossant is waiting out World War II among her father's Egyptian-Jewish relatives. From the moment she arrives at her grandparents' belle époque mansion by the Nile, the five-year-old Colette finds companionship and comfort among the other "outsiders" in her home away from home -- the cooks and servants in the kitchen. The chef, Ahmet, lets Colette taste the ful; she learns how to make sambusaks for her new friends; and she shops for semits and other treats in the Khan-al-Khalili market. Colette is beginning to understand how her family's culture is linked to the kitchen...and soon she will claim Egypt's food, landscape, and people as her own. Apricots on the Nile is a loving testament to Colette's adopted homeland. With dozens of original recipes and family photographs, Colette's coming-of-age memoir is a splendid exploration of old Cairo in all its flavor, variety, and wide-eyed wonder.
Recollections of My Nonexistence
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher:
ISBN: 0593083334
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.
Publisher:
ISBN: 0593083334
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.
Crave
Author: Christine S. O'Brien
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250128854
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
“Do you mind that I’m going to be writing a book about the fact that I was hungry?” I asked my mother. “Just tell a good story,” she replied. Hunger comes in many forms. In her memoir, Crave, Christine S. O’Brien tells a story of family turmoil and incessant hunger hidden behind the luxury and privilege of New York’s famed Dakota apartment building. Her explosively angry father was ABC Executive Ed Scherick, the successful television and film producer who created shows and films like ABC’s Wide World of Sports and The Stepford Wives. Raised on farm in the Midwest, her calm, beautiful mother Carol narrowly survived a dramatic accident when she was child. There was no hint of instability in her life until one day she collapsed in the family’s apartment and spent the next year in bed. “Your mother’s illness is not physical,” Christine’s father tells her. Craving a cure for a malady that the doctors said had no physical basis, Carol resorted to increasingly bizarre nutritional diets—from raw liver to fresh yeast—before beginning a rigid dietary regime known as “The Program.” It consisted largely of celery juice and blended salads—a forerunner of today’s smoothie. Determined to preserve the health of her family, Carol insisted that they follow The Program. Despite their constant hunger, Christine and her three younger brothers loyally followed their mother’s eating plan, even as their father’s rage grew and grew. The more their father screamed, the more their mother’s very survival seemed to depend on their total adherence to The Program. This well-meant tyranny of the dinner table led Christine to her own cravings for family, for food, and for the words to tell the story of her hunger. Crave is the chronicle of Christine’s painful and ultimately satisfying awakening. And, just as her mother asked, it’s a good story.
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250128854
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
“Do you mind that I’m going to be writing a book about the fact that I was hungry?” I asked my mother. “Just tell a good story,” she replied. Hunger comes in many forms. In her memoir, Crave, Christine S. O’Brien tells a story of family turmoil and incessant hunger hidden behind the luxury and privilege of New York’s famed Dakota apartment building. Her explosively angry father was ABC Executive Ed Scherick, the successful television and film producer who created shows and films like ABC’s Wide World of Sports and The Stepford Wives. Raised on farm in the Midwest, her calm, beautiful mother Carol narrowly survived a dramatic accident when she was child. There was no hint of instability in her life until one day she collapsed in the family’s apartment and spent the next year in bed. “Your mother’s illness is not physical,” Christine’s father tells her. Craving a cure for a malady that the doctors said had no physical basis, Carol resorted to increasingly bizarre nutritional diets—from raw liver to fresh yeast—before beginning a rigid dietary regime known as “The Program.” It consisted largely of celery juice and blended salads—a forerunner of today’s smoothie. Determined to preserve the health of her family, Carol insisted that they follow The Program. Despite their constant hunger, Christine and her three younger brothers loyally followed their mother’s eating plan, even as their father’s rage grew and grew. The more their father screamed, the more their mother’s very survival seemed to depend on their total adherence to The Program. This well-meant tyranny of the dinner table led Christine to her own cravings for family, for food, and for the words to tell the story of her hunger. Crave is the chronicle of Christine’s painful and ultimately satisfying awakening. And, just as her mother asked, it’s a good story.
My American Dream
Author: Lidia Matticchio Bastianich
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524731625
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 379
Book Description
For decades, beloved chef Lidia Bastianich has introduced Americans to Italian food through her cookbooks, TV shows, and restaurants. Now she tells her own story for the first time in this “memoir as rich and complex as her mushroom ragú" (O, the Oprah Magazine). Born in Pula, on the Istrian peninsula, Lidia grew up surrounded by love and security, learning the art of Italian cooking from her beloved grandmother. But when Istria was annexed by a communist regime, Lidia’s family fled to Trieste, where they spent two years in a refugee camp waiting for visas to enter the United States. When she finally arrived in New York, Lidia soon began working in restaurants, the first step on a path that led to her becoming one of the most revered chefs and businesswomen in the country. Heartwarming, deeply personal, and powerfully inspiring, My American Dream is the story of Lidia’s close-knit family and her dedication and endless passion for food.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524731625
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 379
Book Description
For decades, beloved chef Lidia Bastianich has introduced Americans to Italian food through her cookbooks, TV shows, and restaurants. Now she tells her own story for the first time in this “memoir as rich and complex as her mushroom ragú" (O, the Oprah Magazine). Born in Pula, on the Istrian peninsula, Lidia grew up surrounded by love and security, learning the art of Italian cooking from her beloved grandmother. But when Istria was annexed by a communist regime, Lidia’s family fled to Trieste, where they spent two years in a refugee camp waiting for visas to enter the United States. When she finally arrived in New York, Lidia soon began working in restaurants, the first step on a path that led to her becoming one of the most revered chefs and businesswomen in the country. Heartwarming, deeply personal, and powerfully inspiring, My American Dream is the story of Lidia’s close-knit family and her dedication and endless passion for food.
In Their Shoes
Author: Grace Halsell
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 0875655270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Probably no American journalist, man or woman, has had a more extraordinary career than Grace Halsell. Before President Lyndon Johnson personally hired her to work in the White House, Halsell had, over a period of two decades, written her way around the world - Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Orient, and the Americas. Born on the windswept plains of West Texas, Halsell was encouraged from the age of five by her pioneer father, who had led cattle drives on the Chisolm Trail, "to travel, to get the benefit" of knowing other peoples. She began her travels at the age of twenty, going first to Mexico and then touring the British Isles by bicycle. Halsell studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and lived in London, Tokyo, Berlin, and Seoul. In Hong Kong, where she lived on a fishing junk with a Chineses family of nineteen, she wrote a column for the Tiger Standard; in Tokyo, where she slept on tatami mats, ate raw fish and took scalding ofuro baths, she was a columnist for the Japan Times. Moving to South America, she traveled on a tug for 2,000 miles down the Amazon and crossed the Andes by jeep. In Lima, she became a columnist for the Spanish-langauge daily, La Prensa. Halsell has seen the Big Buddha, the Taj Mahal, the pyramids and the Machu Micchu, has interviewed presidents, movie stars, kinds, and prime ministers. Her newspaper dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Post, and the Christian Science Monitor have datelined war zones in Korea, Vietnam, and Bosnia, as well as Russia, China, Macedonia, and Albania.
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 0875655270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Probably no American journalist, man or woman, has had a more extraordinary career than Grace Halsell. Before President Lyndon Johnson personally hired her to work in the White House, Halsell had, over a period of two decades, written her way around the world - Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Orient, and the Americas. Born on the windswept plains of West Texas, Halsell was encouraged from the age of five by her pioneer father, who had led cattle drives on the Chisolm Trail, "to travel, to get the benefit" of knowing other peoples. She began her travels at the age of twenty, going first to Mexico and then touring the British Isles by bicycle. Halsell studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and lived in London, Tokyo, Berlin, and Seoul. In Hong Kong, where she lived on a fishing junk with a Chineses family of nineteen, she wrote a column for the Tiger Standard; in Tokyo, where she slept on tatami mats, ate raw fish and took scalding ofuro baths, she was a columnist for the Japan Times. Moving to South America, she traveled on a tug for 2,000 miles down the Amazon and crossed the Andes by jeep. In Lima, she became a columnist for the Spanish-langauge daily, La Prensa. Halsell has seen the Big Buddha, the Taj Mahal, the pyramids and the Machu Micchu, has interviewed presidents, movie stars, kinds, and prime ministers. Her newspaper dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Post, and the Christian Science Monitor have datelined war zones in Korea, Vietnam, and Bosnia, as well as Russia, China, Macedonia, and Albania.
I.M.
Author: Isaac Mizrahi
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN: 1250074088
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “In I.M., Isaac Mizrahi puts his life to paper with the same mix of spirit and wryness as the designs he popularized.” —Vanity Fair Isaac Mizrahi is sui generis: designer, cabaret performer, talk-show host, a TV celebrity. Yet ever since he shot to fame in the late 1980s, the private Isaac Mizrahi has remained under wraps. Until now. In I.M., Isaac Mizrahi offers a poignant, candid, and touching look back on his life so far. Growing up gay in a sheltered Syrian Jewish Orthodox family, Isaac had unique talents that ultimately drew him into fashion and later into celebrity circles that read like a who’s who of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Richard Avedon, Audrey Hepburn, Anna Wintour, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Meryl Streep, and Oprah Winfrey, to name only a few. In his elegant memoir, Isaac delves into his lifelong battles with weight, insomnia, and depression. He tells what it was like to be an out gay man in a homophobic age and to witness the ravaging effects of the AIDS epidemic. Brimming with intimate details and inimitable wit, Isaac's narrative reveals not just the glamour of his years, but the grit beneath the glitz. Rich with memorable stories from in and out of the spotlight, I.M. illuminates deep emotional truths.
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN: 1250074088
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “In I.M., Isaac Mizrahi puts his life to paper with the same mix of spirit and wryness as the designs he popularized.” —Vanity Fair Isaac Mizrahi is sui generis: designer, cabaret performer, talk-show host, a TV celebrity. Yet ever since he shot to fame in the late 1980s, the private Isaac Mizrahi has remained under wraps. Until now. In I.M., Isaac Mizrahi offers a poignant, candid, and touching look back on his life so far. Growing up gay in a sheltered Syrian Jewish Orthodox family, Isaac had unique talents that ultimately drew him into fashion and later into celebrity circles that read like a who’s who of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Richard Avedon, Audrey Hepburn, Anna Wintour, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Meryl Streep, and Oprah Winfrey, to name only a few. In his elegant memoir, Isaac delves into his lifelong battles with weight, insomnia, and depression. He tells what it was like to be an out gay man in a homophobic age and to witness the ravaging effects of the AIDS epidemic. Brimming with intimate details and inimitable wit, Isaac's narrative reveals not just the glamour of his years, but the grit beneath the glitz. Rich with memorable stories from in and out of the spotlight, I.M. illuminates deep emotional truths.
Better Than Sane
Author: Alison C. Rose
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Dorothy Parker meets Holly Golightly in this sharp, delicious, bright-girl-comes-to-New-York memoir. Alison Rose, former actress and former model (sort of), takes us from her childhood to her years atThe New Yorker, revealing how, often, she “didn’t care enough about existence to keep it going herself” and preferred to stay in her room with her animals and think. She writes about her childhood in California, daughter of a movie-star-handsome psychiatrist who was charming to friends but a bully and a tyrant to his family (he hadn’t wanted children; he believed mental illness was hereditary). She writes about how she never liked any place better than her wisteria-covered veranda off her childhood bedroom . . . and about the times she lay by the pool with her sister’s boyfriend (she ten; he eighteen), listening to “Ten Cents a Dance” on the phonograph—and learned the victory of cahoots-style flirtation . . . She writes about moving to Manhattan in her twenties, sleeping in Central Park, subsisting on Valium, Eskatrol, and Sara Lee orange cake . . . about the “alter” family she assembled: Francine from Atlanta, whose beauty was so unnerving she disoriented those around her; “Mother,” the short gay man who photographed Alison; “Baby Bob,” just out of Austen Riggs mental hospital . . . She writes about moving to L.A., attending the Actors Studio, living with Burt Lancaster’s son “Billy the Fish” (he lived in his own element, coming up for other people’s air), sabotaging her acting efforts (no one knew better than Alison how to shut the window on her own fingers) . . . about encountering Helmut Dantine ofCasablancafame, who gave her shelter from the storm, and about meeting Gardner McKay, her childhood TV idol, and becoming friends—sacred, close, lifelong. She writes about returning to New York, getting a job as a receptionist atThe New Yorker, being taken up by the writers there—“a tribe of gods,” who turned her from a semi-recluse into a full-fledged writer (“You can't be the smartest person who doesn’t do anything forever”); about their kindredness, the impromptu club they formed: Insane Anonymous (a “whole other world that was better than sane”); and her emergence as a writer for the magazine. As Renata Adler said of Alison’s path, “It is the most nuanced, courageous, utterly crazy way to have wended.” Better Than Saneis the debut of a supremely gifted and entertaining writer.
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Dorothy Parker meets Holly Golightly in this sharp, delicious, bright-girl-comes-to-New-York memoir. Alison Rose, former actress and former model (sort of), takes us from her childhood to her years atThe New Yorker, revealing how, often, she “didn’t care enough about existence to keep it going herself” and preferred to stay in her room with her animals and think. She writes about her childhood in California, daughter of a movie-star-handsome psychiatrist who was charming to friends but a bully and a tyrant to his family (he hadn’t wanted children; he believed mental illness was hereditary). She writes about how she never liked any place better than her wisteria-covered veranda off her childhood bedroom . . . and about the times she lay by the pool with her sister’s boyfriend (she ten; he eighteen), listening to “Ten Cents a Dance” on the phonograph—and learned the victory of cahoots-style flirtation . . . She writes about moving to Manhattan in her twenties, sleeping in Central Park, subsisting on Valium, Eskatrol, and Sara Lee orange cake . . . about the “alter” family she assembled: Francine from Atlanta, whose beauty was so unnerving she disoriented those around her; “Mother,” the short gay man who photographed Alison; “Baby Bob,” just out of Austen Riggs mental hospital . . . She writes about moving to L.A., attending the Actors Studio, living with Burt Lancaster’s son “Billy the Fish” (he lived in his own element, coming up for other people’s air), sabotaging her acting efforts (no one knew better than Alison how to shut the window on her own fingers) . . . about encountering Helmut Dantine ofCasablancafame, who gave her shelter from the storm, and about meeting Gardner McKay, her childhood TV idol, and becoming friends—sacred, close, lifelong. She writes about returning to New York, getting a job as a receptionist atThe New Yorker, being taken up by the writers there—“a tribe of gods,” who turned her from a semi-recluse into a full-fledged writer (“You can't be the smartest person who doesn’t do anything forever”); about their kindredness, the impromptu club they formed: Insane Anonymous (a “whole other world that was better than sane”); and her emergence as a writer for the magazine. As Renata Adler said of Alison’s path, “It is the most nuanced, courageous, utterly crazy way to have wended.” Better Than Saneis the debut of a supremely gifted and entertaining writer.