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Them
A Memoir Of Parents
by Francine du Plessix Gray
The acclaimed biographer of the likes of the Marquis de Sade and Simone Weil now turns her attention to her own parents, two Russian émigrés who met in Paris and, at the start of WWII, fled together to New York where her mother gained fame as a hat designer and her father climbed the ranks of the Condé Nast publishing empire.
Penguin Press, 544 pages
05/05/2005
$29.95
ISBN: 1594200491
Nonfiction
Biographies & Memoirs
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Kirkus Reviews
Expanded from a New Yorker article, du Plessix Gray's generous, astute study paints two compelling, Machiavellian personalities.
Los Angeles Times Heller McAlpin
With a masterful balance of "ruthlessness and tenderness," research and reminiscence, grievance and gratitude, her book is a sterling example of the personal memoir exalted to cultural history.
Publishers Weekly
Rich with history of early to mid-20th-century design and publishing, this memoir stands as an instructive model of how to write a difficult story honestly.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
No doubt that detachment cultivated in childhood would eventually help Ms. Gray become a writer, and in these pages she uses all her writerly gifts -- her skills of observation, emotional recall and, yes, detachment -- to give the reader an intense and remarkably powerful portrait of her mother and stepfather, and to do so with love, judgmental candor and at least a measure of forgiveness.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] David M. Shribman
It is brisk reading, and a tasty glimpse into a world long gone -- or, more precisely, worlds long gone, for the idealism is gone from communism, the innocence from America, the glamour from New York.
Houston Chronicle Rachel Graves
Like Star magazine for the literary set. Jampacked with juicy gossip, Francine du Plessix Gray's book about her oh-so-fabulous Russian émigré mother and stepfather is guilty pleasure without the guilt.
San Francisco Chronicle Christopher Bernard
Beautifully written, often painfully and bravely honest memoir.
Boston Globe Kate Bolick
Them is blessed with the memoir's equivalent of good bones: epic scope and historic scale.
Chicago Sun-Times Natalie Danford
Fascinatingly complex.
Chicago Tribune Lori Rotskoff
This formidable memoir revisits the terrain of a painful past from the perspective of an adult whose authorial time travels yield a profound, hard-won self-awareness. But "Them" is not merely an evocative childhood memoir; it is an elegant act of literary commemoration and conciliation that exemplifies, as well as describes, the tempered love and respect of a daughter conditioned to adulate her narcissistic parents.
Entertainment Weekly Tina Jordan
An absorbing, elegant portrait of two unforgettable people.
Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
Writing a memoir/biography of one's parents is a difficult task, for some element of first-person narrative is inescapable, but toward the end, Francine du Plessix Gray gives us more than is necessary of herself, diverting the spotlight away from the two people on whom it rightly belongs.
The New York Times Book Review Holly Brubach
In the end, what proves most riveting about Gray's recollections is not the dual portrait of two outsize individuals but the almost incidental delineation of the dynamic between them -- the unspoken contract they entered into as a couple.
Slate Katie Roiphe
Glamour is all about the shining, immaculate surface: It repels insight. And Gray's book is fundamentally unsatisfying because it cannot get beneath her parents' impressive surface.
 The average user rating for this book is 10.0 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
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