How I Came Into My Inheritance: and Other True Stories - Softcover

Gallagher, Dorothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375503463 ISBN 13: 9780375503467

Publisher: Random House, 2001

Synopsis

Dorothy Gallagher began her literary career fabricating sensational stories about celebrities for a pulp magazine whose other writers included Mario Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman. Nothing she made up, though, could rival in color and drama the true story of her own family; Russian-immigrant Jews who lived in Washington Heights, swore allegiance to Marx and Stalin, and tried to ignore the realities of the new world in which their daughter had to make her way. Her mother tells Dorothy that the black girls who beat her up after school are the real victims. Her cousin Meyer returns to the Ukraine during the thirties and finds, to his astonishment, that the whole village is near death from starvation; still he retains his belief in Stalin's leadership. Dorothy moves into a loft on the Bowery, and her father scrounges wood for her stove from nearby vacant lots. She signs a contract for a book with a famous editor and is plunged into despair when he rejects her manuscript. Her Aunt Clara is murdered in her Bronx apartment, and Dorothy is questioned by the police. These stories stand on their own vivid, ironic, darkly funny, and completely original in style. Taken together, they create a unique, brilliantly realized world.

About this title

From the Back Cover

“Readers who relish the truth...will be intoxicated...and will accept her inheritance as their own.”–The New York Times Book Review

“A witty account, colored by an edgy darkness, of her family’s attempts to make sense of this country.”–The Washington Post

“Hilarious and alarming.”–Los Angles Times Book Review

“These family remembrances serve as a reminder to parents and children alike that what lies ahead in life often sneaks up from behind.” –The New Yorker

“A piercingly funny book . . . unsentimental, breezy, blunt.”–Time

About the Author

Dorothy Gallagher was born and raised in New York City. She was a features editor for Redbook magazine, and then became a freelance writer, and her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Grand Street. Her two previous books are Hannah's Daughters, an account of a six-generation matrilineal family, and All the Right Enemies, a biography of the Italian-American anarchist Carlo Tresca. She lives in New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375503463
• ISBN 13: 9780375503467
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208