Borrowed Finery by Paula Fox

Borrowed Finery by Paula Fox

An astonishing, devastating memoir of a 1930s American childhood. A New York Times Best Book of 2001 Born in the 1920s to young, bohemian parents, Paula Fox was left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage. Rescued by her grandmother, Fox eventually landed with a gentle, poor minister in upstate New York. Uncle Elwood, as he came to be known, gave Paula a secure and loving home for many years, but her parents constantly re-surface. Her father is a good-looking, hard-drinking Hollywood screenwriter (among his credits is The Last Train to Madrid, which Graham Greene declared was 'the worst movie I ever saw'), and her mother, icily glamorous, is given to almost psychotic bursts of temper that punctuate a deep, disturbing indifference. They exercise, probably without even realising it, a sort of drip-drip cruelty, a cruelty by stealth, upon Paula, as they shuttle her from one exotic place to another, from a Cuban sugar plantation to Hollywood to Montreal to Florida, from relative to relative, never spending more than a few moments with her, maybe 2 days, maybe 2 weeks, before they leave her and move on. Paula Fox has a voice of great clarity and simplicity and this is an incredibly powerful, straight-to-the-heart piece of writing. A novelist and children's writer, her adult fiction is currently undergoing a resurrection in the US, admired and lauded by Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Andrea Barrett, to name but a few, who claim a place for her alongside Updike, Roth & Bellow. Several of her novels, including the most famous, Desperate Characters, a piercing portrait of a Sixties NY couple, are spectacularly back in print in the US, and Ms Fox is being rightly appreciated once again. Offers the same reading experience as Bad Blood – readable, honest, beautifully written, quietly devastating.

‘Borrowed Finery is like being let into a living diary, full of glittering scenes that, as you turn to them, suddenly begin to moveIt is a more humane, even-handed and entertaining book than many of the people involved had any right to expect.’ The Times

‘It is with amazement, approaching incredulity, that I read Paula Fox’s account of being abandoned by her parents. Gripping and shocking.’ The Sunday Times

‘In less poised hands, this story could turn to self-pitying melodrama. Fox’s telling, however, is as sharp and clean as a whiplash, piquing the reader’s curiosity.’ Herald

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

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780007137244
ISBN 10	0007137249
Title	Borrowed Finery
Author	Paula Fox
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers
Year published	2002-08-05
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable