May 25, 2020
In this intimate memoir, art historian Herrera (Isamu Noguchi) writes of being the daughter of “upper bohemian” artist parents who believed in “the importance of pleasure and living life to the hilt.” Herrera vividly brings to life her childhood summers in the 1940s and ’50s spent with her sister swimming at the family property, Horseleech Pond, in Cape Cod and of her chaotic and often magical experiences living in Manhattan and on the outskirts of Mexico City. Herrera’s father had inherited land on Cape Cod, and on it built houses that would eventually host their bohemian friends, including British architect Serge Chermayeff, Hungarian Futurist designer Marcel Breuer, artists György and Juliet Kepes, structural engineer Paul Weidlinger, novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, writer Edmund Wilson, and Peggy Guggenheim. Herrera notes that her often itinerant childhood was confusing, but her mother remains at the center: Herrera tells of the end of her parents’ marriage when her mother began an affair with scientist George Senseney; and of being driven to Mexico at age 10 in the “Coche de Mama” (her mother’s Chrysler station wagon, with real wood paneling) to live with her mother’s new boyfriend, Edmundo Lasalle. Her mother died in 1995, and Herrera writes that she felt “something enormous, like sunshine, like the pull of gravity, went out of my life.” This is a sparkling portrait of a rarified and complex upbringing.
January 1, 2020
The parents of Pulitzer Prize finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning biographer Herrera lived in what her mother called Upper Bohemia. They were from wealthy backgrounds, living the artistic life (with friends like Max Ernst, Edmund Wilson, and Peggy Guggenheim). But they neglected their children, divorcing when Herrera was five and each marrying four more times. With a 50,000-copy first printing.
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June 1, 2021
Herrera's gorgeous parents, each born in 1908, were married five times, had "numerous love affairs," and were devoted to living "a passionate life," no matter their children's needs. They were "upper bohemians," blue blood American nonconformists living impulsive, hand-to-mouth lives of shabby privilege and epic ardor. Herrera's incisive portraits of her parents and their volatile world subtly forecast her future calling as a superb biographer of artists Frida Kahlo, Isamu Noguchi, and Arshile Gorky (whose widow became Herrera's stepmother and godmother). Herrera's stunning, fearless, narcissistic mother put her lovers before her two daughters, precipitating a wildly improvisational, sometimes exciting, often harrowing and nomadic existence in New York, Boston, Cape Cod, and Mexico. The girls had to fend for themselves physically and emotionally except during brief interludes of tender, loving care with wealthy relatives. Herrera seems to have cultivated her keen powers of observation to survive neglect, upheaval, and worse. But she also recounts the joy she found in nature and other exhilarating experiences as she reveals a little-known realm of insistent liberation, romance, restlessness, recklessness, and the pursuit of beauty.
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Starred review from February 15, 2020
Memories of a chaotic, peripatetic, and often magical childhood in the 1940s and '50s. In the preface to this excellent memoir--Herrera's first, after acclaimed biographies of Frida Kahlo, Henri Matisse, Maxim 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 1908 to 1920, 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 haphazard. Herrera's parents "were stars within their own community. They were talented and intelligent, but their most important asset was their beauty." For the remainder of the book, the author slips beneath the surface of her childhood, spent on Cape Cod and in Manhattan, Boston, and Mexico. She maintains the perspective she had on events at that time, vividly evoking the little girl at the center of this story: her curiosity, pain, constant concern about her weight, disappointment in her father, and idolization of her mother. In 1950, when the girls were with their father in Cape Cod, their mother appeared in a car she called the "Coche de Mama" and drove them straight down to Mexico. The author's accounts of the drive and the years in Mexico are highly cinematic, and Herrera avoids the excessive commentary, analysis, blame, and self-pity common in this type of memoir, allowing readers directly into the experience. In a satisfying epilogue, the author fills in the rest of the story up to the present day. The black-and-white photos attest to the beauty of the settings and all the people in them. By concentrating on telling a colorful, absorbing story rather than proving a point, Herrera moves and transports us.
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June 1, 2021
Spanning the art hubs of New York, Mexico City, and Cape Cod in the 1940s and 1950s, this memoir by art historian and author Herrera (Listening to Stone) recounts a childhood where parental disinterest and absence led to wild adventures and even danger. Herrera documents her and her sister's childhood vulnerability and experiences of near-kidnapping and sexual assault. Beyond the memoir's informal cameos of artists and writers who made up her parents' social circle, Herrera's clear, piercing language both manifests and foils the allure of the society her mother calls "Upper Bohemia." Herrera's craft shines in her ability to write candidly about class and privilege in a memoir dedicated to childhood wonder.The book imparts a desire for belonging and parental affirmation; Herrera writes affectionate and at times scandalous portraits that preserve her younger self, her siblings, her parents, and her parents' lovers, sometimes with images of their naked bodies. And yet, the romance she best preserves in this memoir is her relationship with Cape Cod, a pastoral setting of lost generational wealth and intense familiarity. VERDICT Herrera's memoir engages in discussions of mental health, equality, and fulfillment without passing judgement on her subjects; a rare feat. A riveting story of necessary resilience.--Asa Drake, Marion County P.L., FL
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