Sleeping Arrangements - Softcover

Laura Shaine Cunningham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747579326 ISBN 13: 9780747579328

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2006

Synopsis

This is the magical memoir of Lily Shaine, an orphan brought up by her two eccentric bachelor uncles in New York in the 1950s. Uncle Len is a six-foot-six-inch private investigator, a trench-coated cross between Abraham Lincoln and Sam Spade. Uncle Gabe, a librarian, is a confirmed dreamer who writes gospel songs in his spare time. With these two men as mentors, the human jungle of the Bronx as her playground, the schoolroom as her torture chamber and very knowing little girls as her playmates, Lily learns the secrets of life, sex, death and, above all, family love. A wry, funny and deeply affectionate portrait of the most unlikely of happy families, "Sleeping Arrangements" is a modern classic.

About this title

About the Author:

Laura Shaine Cunningham's books include the novels Dreams of Rescue (to be published by Bloomsbury in 2006) and Beautiful Bodies and one other memoir, A Place in the Country. She lives in New York and writes regularly for the theatre (Beautiful Bodies leads a dual life as a play with global popularity) and for publications such as the New Yorker, New York Times and Atlantic Monthly.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Inside our apartment, we are gradually creating customs and inventing our own special language." So eight-year-old Lily describes life with two bachelor uncles in the Bronx of the 1950s. The unorthodox arrangement came about after the death of Lily's mother, Rosie--who invented a war-hero husband, improvised his death in the Korean war and bequeathed to her daughter a persistent hunger for information about him. We follow Lily through her adolescence, aided and abetted by uncles Len and Gabe, who keep house, cook erratically, pursue their own dreams and tend their precocious niece. This odd, yet creative, household was a happy one, even as they coped with the ups and downs of Lily's schooling and her indoctrination into junior high-school society, where she learned the sexual ploys of her peers, entertainingly detailed here. In an effective memoir that delineates a real, if idiosyncratic, world, Cunningham captures a special slice of New York with humor and integrity.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0747579326
• ISBN 13: 9780747579328
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240