Hayden herrera upper bohemia
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Upper Bohemia
"For a biographer, looking into one’s own life can be a risky enterprise. For a biographer as accomplished as Hayden Herrera, it has turned out to be a risk worth taking. Her beautiful, entitled, and rather heedless parents may have failed at making households (they had ten marriages between them), but in the pages of Upper Bohemia the author has found her way home. Her book is honest, revealing, and deeply felt." — Daniel Okrent, author of The Guarded Gate
“An exotic American group portrait like those of John Singer Sargent.” —Fanny Howe, author of Love and I
“Hayden Herrera’s Upper Bohemia is a two-fold marvel. Her writing evokes the sensual richness of a hyper-alert child’s perceptions with a resonance that calls to mind Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Unlike many memoirists, Herrera never oversimplifies; she embraces the complexity of parents who alternately feasted and starved their children.” —Mary Gordon, author of The Liar’s Wife
“Possessed o
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UPPER BOHEMIA
Memories of a chaotic, peripatetic, and often magical childhood in the s and ’50s.
In the preface to this excellent memoir—Herrera’s first, after acclaimed biographies of Frida Kahlo, Henri Matisse, grundregel Gorky, and others—the author explains that she and her sister, in their 80s, have never been able to decide whether their mother was wonderful or terrible. “Our terrible mother gave [us] a wonderful life,” she writes. “And, she was not the only terrible mother.” Both of their parents, each married multiple times and only briefly to one another, were members of a class her mother called “upper bohemia.” Born into privilege from about to , these free spirits dedicated themselves to artistic and intellectual pursuits as well as to their own pleasure. When it came to raising children, they were usually inconsistent and slumpmässig. Herrera’s parents “were stars within their own community. They were talented and intelligent, but their most important asset was their beauty.
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Confronting the Wild Years: On Hayden Herrera’s “Upper Bohemia”
Heather Scott Partington dwells on “Upper Bohemia,” a memoir by illustrious biographer Hayden Herrera.
Upper Bohemia by Hayden Herrera. Simon & Schuster, pages.
IT’S HARD TO WRITE about Hayden Herrera’s Upper Bohemia. It’s a memoir, but not in the way that so many memoirs take one long story over a traditional roller coaster of plot points. Herrera is after something different, a story told by amalgam, a story that gets to its essence not by sticking too long with any one episode, but by showing through a long series of short memories that a lifetime of well-meaning neglect can breed fear, uncertainty, and dissatisfaction in children.
Some context: Hayden Herrera’s Upper Bohemia is a memoir of the author’s childhood during the s in Cape Cod, New York City, Mexico City, and Boston. Her parents, two upper-class artists of means, “did not have to earn confidence by achievement.” Both talented and beaut