Francine du Plessix Gray is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the author of numerous essays and books, including Simone Weil, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Rage and Fire, Lovers and Tyrants, and Soviet Women. She lives with her husband, the painter Cleve Gray.
Astonishing... [Gray] uses all her writerly gifts... to give the reader an intense and remarkably powerful portrait. (Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times") Exquisite... Gray has written that rare memoir never sunk by indulgence. ("The Philadelphia Inquirer") A spellbinding, warts-and-all double portrait... a sterling example of the personal memoir exalted to cultural history. ("Los Angeles Times")
Du Plessix Gray introduces us to her brilliant, high-style, neurotic parents, Tatiana du Plessix and Conde Nast heavyweight Alexander Lieberman. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
"My mother enjoyed claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan," Gray explains as she opens this complex and rewarding family memoir. That claim gave her mother "both the aristocratic pedigree and the freedom to be a barbarian." Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix Liberman was 19 and hungry in 1925 when she left the Soviet Union for France. Tatiana and Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky soon fell passionately in love, but the ever-practical woman married aristocratic Frenchman Bertrand du Plessix instead. They had one child, Francine, before du Plessix was killed in early WWII combat. Tatiana then became involved with Alexander Liberman, a British- and French-educated artistic Jewish-Russian ?migr?. Alex, Tatiana and Francine fled to New York in 1941 and started a new lifeATatiana designing hats for Bendel's before a career with Saks, Alex scaling the fashion journalism ladder at Cond? Nast. New Yorker contributor Gray tells the story of this talented, self-absorbed couple from their roots to their graves. The final chaptersAwith the death of Demerol-addicted Tatiana and Alex's remarriage to an adoring nurseAare unbearably tragic, and the inside story of the Liberman m?nage is more addictive than any Vanity Fair exclusive. Gray is such a fine writer, her family story reads like a novel of early 20th-century bohemianism gone corporate. Rich with history of early to mid-20th-century design and publishing, this memoir stands as an instructive model of how to write a difficult story honestly. Gray's parents were not nice people, but she loved them, and readers, by the end, understand why. Photos. Agents, Georges and Anne Borchardt. (May 5) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Astonishing... [Gray] uses all her writerly gifts... to give the reader an intense and remarkably powerful portrait. (Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times") Exquisite... Gray has written that rare memoir never sunk by indulgence. ("The Philadelphia Inquirer") A spellbinding, warts-and-all double portrait... a sterling example of the personal memoir exalted to cultural history. ("Los Angeles Times")
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