The Leopard Hat: A Daughter's Story - Hardcover

Steiker, Valerie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375421017 ISBN 13: 9780375421013

Publisher: Pantheon, 2002

Synopsis

This indelible story of a mother and daughter opens with a magical childhood on the Upper East Side of New York. At its heart is Valerie Steiker’s mother, Gisèle, a Belgian Jew who, as a child, was hidden from the Nazis during World War II. As an adult, Gisèle developed a large appetite for joy, beauty, and spontaneity, tempered only by her old-world superstitions and protectiveness. The apartment on Madison Avenue where she and her husband raised two daughters overflowed with books, musical instruments, velvet-lined boxes, Gisèle’s flamboyant wardrobe, and, above all, love and warmth.

When Gisèle died during her daughter’s junior year at Harvard, Steiker’s challenge was to preserve the enveloping glow of her mother’s presence even as she stepped outside of it. With grace and humor, she explores her girlhood and adolescence and the crucial growing pains of her twenties. She falls in love; she moves to Paris for a year on her own; she returns home to find her mother still absent. Layering episodes in her own life with those of her mother’s, she often sees Gisèle illuminated in her own experiences.

The Leopard Hat is an intimate account of loss and reconciliation, and of the unshakable bond between a mother and daughter; it is, finally, the celebration of a young woman’s vivacious emergence into adulthood.

About this title

Review

Valerie Steiker's poignant memoir limns with love the indelible impact of her glamorous, adored mother, Gisèle, and her painful struggle to come to terms with Gisèle's premature death from cancer in 1988, when Valerie was only 20. The book's marvelous opening pages portray a beautiful, privileged woman who can't do her own hair and throws the entire household into disarray when dressing to go out with her husband. Swathed in gowns, bedecked in jewels, and always shod in high heels (even on her canvas boat shoes), Gisèle is the epitome of a wealthy, sophisticated New Yorker. She's also a Belgian-born Jew who spent the war years in hiding with her mother after her father was deported to Auschwitz; the magical cocoon Gisèle spins for her daughters in their East Side apartment is a creation of her will and imagination, her passionate desire to give them the childhood she was denied. Steiker's luminous prose, vividly evoking Gisèle's allure, makes palpable the void left by her loss. Only at the end of a five-year romance launched just weeks after Gisèle's death does the author realize, "I had been desperately trying to hold on to my mother ... at the expense of my growing more fully into myself." The chapters about Valerie's postcollege years as a young writer and editor in Manhattan, though well-written and intelligent, aren't quite as compelling as the ones that tenderly chronicle her mother's life. This is Gisèle's book, and it's clear her daughter wouldn't have wanted it any other way. --Wendy Smith

From the Back Cover

Valerie Steiker's "The Leopard Hat" is something rare: a completely charming and winsome book about a completely serious subject -- a mother's love and her loss, and the hold that both have on her daughter's memory. Written with a lyrical brightness and exuberant delight in the details of New York hats and gloves, private schools and taxis, "The Leopard Hat" also has a genuine pathos that sends the reader back again and again to see and feel with the author. Can there be any loving daughter who won't see something of her mother in this memoir, or many readers who won't be taken by its special mixture of the high-hearted and the heart-breaking?
--Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon

"'The Leopard Hat' is an ode to courage, elegance and beauty. Valerie Steiker has written a compelling, sensitive book that reads fluidly and touches the heart."
---Diane von Furstenberg

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375421017
• ISBN 13: 9780375421013
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336