Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir
Anne Roiphe, 2000
Simon & Schuster (Touchstone)
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780684857329
In Brief
From National Book Award nominee Anne Roiphe comes this moving memoir of growing up in a wealthy Jewish home with a family who had money, status, culture — everything but happiness.
While the nation was at war abroad, Roiphe, who was coming of age in 1940s New York City, saw her parents at war in their living room. Roiphe's evocative writing puts readers right in Apartment 8C, where a constant tension plays out between a disappointed and ineffectual mother, a philandering father who uses his wife's money to entertain other women, and a difficult brother. Behind the leisure culture of wealthy Jewish society — the mahjongg games, the cocktail parties, the summer houses — lurks a brutality that strikes a chord with a daughter who longs to heal the wounds of her troubled family.
Writing with a novelist's sensibility, Roiphe reveals the poignant story of a family that has finally claimed its material wealth in a prosperous America but has yet to claim its spiritual due. (From the publisher.)
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About the Author
• Birth—December 25, 1935
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College
• Currently—lives in New York City
Anne Roiphe is an American writer and journalist, best-known as a first-generation feminist and author of the novel Up The Sandbox (1970), which was filmed as a starring vehicle for Barbra Streisand in 1972. In 1996, Salon called the book "a feminist classic."
Over a four-decade career, Roiphe has proven so prolific that the critic Sally Eckoff of Salon observed—"tracing Anne Roiphe's career often feels like following somebody through a revolving door: the requirements of keeping the pace can be trying." (Eckoff described the writer as "a free-thinking welter of contradictions, a never-say-die feminist who's absolutely nuts about children").
Roiphe published her first novel, Digging Out, in 1967. Her second, Up The Sandbox (1970), became a national best-seller and made the author's career.
All told, Roiphe has published nine novels, six works of non-fiction, and three memoirs, while contributing essays and reviews to the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, and others.
In 1993, the New York Times described her as "a writer who has never toed a party line, feminist or otherwise." Her 1996 memoir Fruitfu: A Memoir of Modem Motherhood was nominated for the National Book Award.
From 1997 to 2002, she served as a columnist for the New York Observer. Roiphe is the mother of author and cultural critic Katie Roiphe. (From Wikipedia.)
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Critics Say . . .
By not trying to make many grand statements about the human experience, Roiphe ends up making a few rather eloquent statments about the human experience....[P]erhaps the larger point of this [book] is that not only can one survive parental.
Karen Lehrman - New York Times Book Review
Probing....Roiphe's [book] is an acute social history as well as a personal account.
Boston Globe
A noted author of fiction (her 1970 Up the Sandbox was a landmark portrayal of women's motherhood and career conflicts) as well as nonfiction (Fruitful was a 1996 National Book Award finalist), Roiphe recalls growing up in a loveless household marked by petty bitterness and fueled by murderous rage. Outwardly, it was a world of privilege, endowed by the fortune of Israel Phillips, her maternal grandfather, the founder of the Phillips Van Heusen shirt company. The family's wealth attracted a tall, handsome husband for Israel's daughter Blanche, but the union was miserable. Anne's mother was prey to neurotic insecurities that were resistant to lifelong psychiatric counseling, and she became a chain-smoking semi-invalid. Like her philandering husband, Blanche displayed little interest in the children, who were consigned to the care of a stern German governess. In this surprising and gripping memoir, Roiphe unflinchingly describes her savage jealousy at the birth of her brother and the anger that always underlay their relationship. Her extended family circle included Roy Cohn, whose attempt to fix Anne up for a blind date with his colleague David Schine's younger brother provides one of the book's lighter moments. She describes with telling detail her passage to adulthood, but the story of her inner journey—how she managed to escape the destructive atmosphere of her home and become a celebrated novelist and critic—remains a puzzle. Nevertheless Roiphe's devastating memoir fully engages the reader in her painful story of hatred and betrayal.
Publishers Weekly
With a rush of words, layer upon layer, acclaimed author Roiphe ( Fruitful; Up the Sandbox, 1970) dissects her childhood family, depicting as well a grim view of growing up rich and Jewish on Upper Park Avenue in the 1940s and 1950s. The daughter of a wealthy, frightened, chainsmoking mother and a handsome, philandering, cold, immigrant father who rejected his past, Roiphe watched her parents savage each other daily. Unable to connect with her asthmatic, hated, hateful younger brother (though later there is some reconciliation), Roiphe forged a relationship with her mother by becoming her confidante while still craving her father's love. The tragedy of her parents' disastrous marriage repeats itself in Roiphe's own life, when she marries a man like her father, who wants her money but not her. This is not pleasurable reading: the subject matter is deceptively brutal, and the writing is marred by too much detail and repetition. Nonetheless, it is hard to put down this mesmerizing memoir. —Francine Fialkoff
Library Journal
There is sometimes too much obsessive detail, but Roiphe's acerbic, passionate sentences twist and turn and stop you short with their wit and painful insight. In simple words, she hears her brother's reason for having only one child: "He told me he would never do to his son what had been done to him, that is me, that is, a sibling." —Hazel Rochman
Booklist
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Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for 1185 Park Avenue:
1. An obvious place to start discussing this memoir is with the author's parents. Describe them, their characteristics, and then talk their marriage and parenting (or lack thereof). In other words, what's wrong with these people?
2. What is the relationship between Anne and her younger brother...and why? What does Anne discover about why Johnny is always sick.
3. Why does Anne sit outside her mother's room, waiting for her? Why does she crave the attention of a mother who is so obviously deficient in mothering skills? And what about Johnny, of whom Anne says, "He waited for no one"?
3. At one point, Roiphe ponders: "Is this story literally true? I'm not sure exactly. As I tell the tale, and I have told it often, it rings somewhat untrue." Does that remark anger you as a reader...that it's your responsibility, rather than the author's, to ferret out what is true or untrue? Why might Roiphe have admitted such a thing? Is it objective truth she's after...or emotional truth? Is there a difference?
4. How would you describe the tone of Roiphe's writing—is it sensational...or matter-of-fact? Do you find the work more "observational" or more "confessional"? What's the distinction? Does she seek to place blame...and, if so, on whom?
5. When referring to Emma, Roiphe makes the observation that "equal was opportunity not result, but where Emma's opportunity?" What does she mean?
6. How difficult was it for Roiphe to escape the effects of her tortuous childhood? Is it possible for all of us to throw off the painful repercussions of our past—or is Roiphe able to do so because she is particularly gifted? Put another way: are we bound to repeat the patterns of our own upbringing?
7. Does Anne Roiphe see herself as a victim? What does she come to understand about herself and her family? How does she come to terms with familial betrayal—what greater, deeper truth does she arrive at?
8. Is this book an expose of appallingly bad parenting...or a work of social analysis, dissecting a select slice of life in Manhattan during the 1940s and '50s?
9. Which sections of this memoir particularly struck you—as troublesome or painful or interesting...or even funny?
10. Have you read other memoris similar to Roiphe's, books that talk about difficult, or pleasant, growing-up years? If so, how does 1185 Park Avenue compare?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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