Women & Children First

Description

Born in the 1920s to nomadic, bohemian parents, Paula Fox is left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage, then cared for by a poor yet cultivated minister in upstate New York. Her parents, however, soon resurface. Her handsome father is a hard-drinking screenwriter who is, for young Paula, "part ally, part betrayer." Her mother is given to icy bursts of temper that punctuate a deep indifference. How, Fox wonders, is this woman "enough of an organic being to have carried me in her belly"?

Never sharing more than a few moments with his daughter, Fox's father allows her to be shuttled from New York City, where she lives with her passive Spanish grandmother, to Cuba, where she roams freely on a relative's sugarcane plantation, to California, where she finds herself cast upon Hollywood's seedy margins. The thread binding these wanderings is the "borrowed finery" of the title-a few pieces of clothing, almost always lent by kindhearted strangers, which offer Fox a rare glimpse of permanency.

Instantly embraced by reviewers and readers as a classic, this astonishing memoir of a writer's highly unusual beginnings is unforgettable.
Paula Fox is the author of five novels, including Desperate Characters, The Widow's Children, and Poor George. She is also a Newberry Award-winning children's book author. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir

This astonishing memoir, Fox's first book in nearly a decade, centers on her highly unusual beginnings. Born in the 1920s to nomadic, bohemian parents, Fox is left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage, then cared for by a poor yet cultivated minister in upstate New York. Her parents, however, soon resurface. Her handsome father is a hard-drinking screenwriter who is, for young Paula, "part ally, part betrayer." Her mother is given to icy bursts of temper that punctuate a deep indifference. How, Fox wonder, is this woman "enough of an organic being to have carried me in her belly?"

Never sharing more than a few moments with his daughter, Fox's father allows her to be shunted from New York City, where she lives with her passive Spanish grandmother, to Cuba, where she roams freely on a relative's sugar-cane plantation, to California, where she finds herself cast upon Hollywood's grubby margins. The thread binding these wanderings is the "borrowed finery" of the title—a few pieces of clothing, almost always lent by kind-hearted strangers, that offer Fox a rare glimpse of permanency.
"Pointillist in detail, lapidary in method and brutal in effect, Borrowed Finery is an eloquent, disturbing memoir—and the perfect bookend to the author's powerful novels."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Captures the off-balance existential wooziness of experience in compact, unbidden epiphanies . . . [A] singular, unsentimental memoir."—Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World

"She is a genius about hungers and judgment, and she writes of them in a prose that is brave and graceful, the way great dancers are. She has been wonderful in print while private but now, with Borrowed Finery, she tells herself to us, and the story is beautiful."—Frederick Busch

"Restrained yet unsparing . . . [Fox's] tools are a lucid style, a cool, mildly ironic tone"—Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

"One of the most impressive books of the year."—Gerald Howard, The Nation

"In her first memoir, accomplished novelist and children's book author Fox (Desperate Characters) recounts the chaotic and often traumatic circumstances of her childhood. With parents too unstable and self-absorbed to care for her, she was shuffled from doorstep to boarding school, from New York to Cuba to Montreal . . . Fox tells her stories with no trace of self-pity. Her style is honest without being laborious, and her recollections bear the unmistakable mark of uncontrived innocence. Highly recommended."—Stephanie Maher, Warwick, Rhode Island, Library Journal

"Like Fox's fiction for adults and young people, her memoir of childhood and coming-of-age speaks with spare realism about desperate upheaval. At the center is her glamorous mother, Elsie, who never wanted a baby. She hates Paula. 'Either she goes or I go,' she tells Paula's alcoholic dad, who tells Paula. So the child is always a nomad, lurching from one relative or kindly stranger to another, then back to a parent, then off again, from one school to another, from New York to Cuba to Hollywood and back again. In a series of taut, intimate vignettes, Fox stays true to the young girl's bewildered viewpoint, and, like the child, the reader wants to get closer, to know more. Yet the drama is in that sense of exclusion, of always being on the edge of secrets. 'It felt as if we were being continuously introduced to each other,' she says after one unforgettable episode when her mother takes her shopping for shoes. Fox adds a wry term to the PC lexicon: 'domestically undereducated.'"—Hazel Rochman, Booklist

"Newbery Award-winning novelist Fox (A Servant's Tale) lived a rather accidental, devastating childhood. Her Jazz Age parents dropped her at an orphanage shortly after her birth in 1923, from which she was rescued by a kindly clergyman and passed along, as in a 'fire brigade,' to various 'rescuers,' odd relatives or her parents' drinking buddies, mostly. Her scriptwriter daddy, a happy drunk, cared but was careless. Mom, on the other hand, with her 'cold radiant smile,' was openly rejecting. Her occasional reluctant meetings with Fox felt 'as if we were being continually introduced to each other.' No small wonder, then, that at age 21, Fox surrendered her own daughter for adoption. This could have been another Mommy Dearest, except that Fox is elegantly understated, relying on well-chosen detail and striking images to tell her tale. A nasty auntie crochets in 'colors that suggested mud or blood or urine' and keeps her work in a sack with handles like 'copperhead snakes.' Her mother's one contribution to her education is teaching her solitaire. A childhood beau walks 'lurching to the side like the knight's move in chess.' Visiting her dying mother, Fox can't bear to use a toilet her mother might have used, and flees outdoors to use a tree. It would all be unbearably melancholic (à la Jean Rhys), except that Fox survives. The hard-won truths of her youth form the basis for the sensitive focus on family dynamics that characterizes her children's fiction, notably Blowfish Live in the Sea. Fox deserves a comeback."—Publishers Weekly
From Borrowed Finery:

My parents returned from Europe after a sojourn of three or four years, when I was eleven. They slid into my sight standing on the deck of a small passenger ship out of Marseille that docked in New York City on the Hudson River. They were returning home after their adventures, the most recent being their flight a few weeks earlier from the Balearic Island of Ibiza during the early days of the Spanish Civil War.

It had been years since I'd seen them. They were as handsome as movie stars. Smoke trailed like a festive streamer from the cigarette my mother held between two fingers of her right hand. When she realized we'd spotted her, she waved once and her head was momentarily wreathed in smoke. The gangplank was lowered thunderously across the abyss between the deck and the pier. Passengers began to trickle across it. Suddenly my parents were standing before us, a steamer trunk like a

About the Author

Paula Fox is the author of five novels, including Desperate Characters, The Widow's Children, and Poor George. She is also a Newberry Award-winning children's book author. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Praise for Borrowed Finery: A Memoir…

A New York Times Editor's Choice

National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee

"[A] singular, unsentimental memoir of her formative years."--Chris Lehmann, Washington Post Book World

"Restrained yet unsparing . . . Fox is an accomplished writer, with a gift for penetrating to the heart of complex feelings and complicated situations."--Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

"The memoir has a cumulative power. . . . You feel you've been privy to something memorable and weighty: the birth, however difficult, of an artist's--a woman artist's--sensibility."--Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Magazine

"One of the most impressive books of the year."--Gerald Howard, The Nation

"Pointillist in detail, lapidary in method and brutal in effect, Borrowed Finery is an eloquent, disturbing memoir-- and the perfect bookend to the author's powerful novels."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times