A New Yorker Best Book of 2021
A “touching, heartbreaking, and exceptional” (Town & Country) coming-of-age memoir by the daughter of artistic, bohemian parents—set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, Cape Cod, and Mexico.
Hayden Herrera’s parents each married five times; following their desires was more important to them than looking after their children. When Herrera was only three years old, her parents separated, and she and her sister moved from Cape Cod to New York City to live with their mother and their new hard-drinking stepfather. They saw their father only during the summers on the Cape, when they and the other neighborhood children would be left to their own devices by parents who were busy painting, writing, or composing music. These adults inhabited a world that Herrera’s mother called “upper bohemia,” a milieu of people born to privilege who chose to focus on the life of the mind. Her parents’ friends included such literary and artistic heavyweights as artist Max Ernst, writers Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy, architect Marcel Breuer, and collector Peggy Guggenheim.
On the surface, Herrera’s childhood was idyllic and surreal. But underneath, the pain of being a parent’s afterthought was acute. Upper Bohemia captures the tension between a child’s excitement at every new thing and her sadness at losing the comfort of a reliable family. For her parents, both painters, the thing that mattered most was beauty—and so her childhood was expanded by art and by a reverence for nature. But her early years were also marred by abuse and by absent, irresponsible adults. As a result, Herrera would move from place to place, parent to parent, relative to family friend, and school to school—eventually following her mother to Mexico. The stepparents and stepsiblings kept changing too.
Intimate and honest, Upper Bohemia “captures an enchanted but erratic childhood in a rarefied milieu with the critical but appreciative eye of a seasoned art historian” (The Wall Street Journal). It is a celebration of a wild and pleasure-filled way of living—and a poignant reminder of the toll such narcissism takes on the children raised in its grip.
ISBN-13: 9781982105297
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 06-21-2022
Pages: 272
Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.40(d)
Hayden Herrera is an art historian and the author of biographies of Frida Kahlo, Arshile Gorky, Mary Frank, Isamu Noguchi, and Henri Matisse. Her biography of Gorky was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her biography of Noguchi won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in New York City and Cape Cod.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
2017: View from the Porch 1
1 The Big House 3
2 Friends 15
3 Turkey Farm 25
4 Divorce 33
5 Manhattan 39
6 Mountain Climber 47
7 Scary 53
8 Granny Blair 61
9 Birthday Parties 65
10 Thoughts 69
11 The City 73
12 Cornwall 79
13 Dasya 85
14 Mougouch 93
15 Hickory Ridge 99
16 Toads 105
17 The Manheims 113
18 Gaga 121
19 Naked 135
20 Coche de Mama 141
21 Mexico 153
22 Coyoacán 157
23 Cuernavaca 165
24 Outings 173
25 Parque Melchor Ocampo 183
26 With Family 189
27 Without Blair 195
28 Esquela Pan Americana 207
29 Betrayal 215
30 Myrtle Street 219
31 Edward Norman 225
32 Beach Glass 229
Postscript 239
Acknowledgments 247
