Are You Happy?: A Childhood Remembered - Hardcover

Gordon, Emily Fox

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594489041 ISBN 13: 9781594489044

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2006

Synopsis

Recounts the author's 1950s childhood and how it was marked by her mother's alcoholic depression, her own struggles with weight and poor academic performance, and lone rambles through a succession of indoor and outdoor landscapes, in a personal memoir in which the author explains how happiness can be recaptured through telling the story of its loss. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Emily Fox Gordon is an award-winning essayist and the author of the memoir Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy, a New York Times notable book. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, the Pushcart Prize anthologies, The Anchor Essay Annual, The New York Times Book Review, Boulevard, and Salmagundi. She has taught at Rice University and the University of Wyoming.

From Publishers Weekly:

The answer to the question posed by such a title would seem, inevitably, to be "no," but Gordon qualifies her frequent tears as "the manifestation of a particularly satisfying kind of lyrical sadness." This is her second venture into memoir, following the well-reviewed Mockingbird Years, an account of her institutionalization as a late teenager and subsequent therapy. This book covers her earlier, 1950s childhood as the daughter of a miserly and often hectoring Jewish economics professor at Williams College, whom she claims to have hated, and his eventually alcoholic Presbyterian schoolteacher wife. Though bright (readers are told frequently), Gordon felt like a "misfit"; an overweight, underachieving faculty brat; a "social pariah"; a "blob." By sixth grade, she was failing school and, like her classmates, fascinated by sex. A crush on her voice coach led her to try to implicate his wife in an affair with the soccer coach, but the lie was easily discovered, leaving her humiliated and eager to move with her parents from the Berkshires to Manhattan for a fresh start. The book, about childhood friends and teachers, too, analyzes Gordon's parents throughout. Early on, Gordon comments, "There's nothing more tiresome than a grown daughter's brief against her parents." Indeed. (Mar.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1594489041
• ISBN 13: 9781594489044
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256