"Our mother was a terrible mother, wasn't she?" is a question that art historian and biographer Hayden Herrera (Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work) poses at the beginning of her frank and fearless memoir, Upper Bohemia.
Herrera and her sister, Blair, were born to Elizabeth and John Phillips, beautiful patricians with impeccable bloodlines and family wealth--although after the onset of the Great Depression there was never enough money. Still, there was the house in Cape Cod built on 800 inherited acres, with Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy as neighbors. There was the Manhattan apartment tended by a housemaid. But money was irrelevant. What mattered was art, freedom, love and the company of writers and artists whom Hayden's mother called "upper bohemians."
With their stunning good looks and good family backgrounds, Hayden's parents had "the gift of confidence." They saw themselves as artists, unconfined by convention or their children. After their parents divorced, Hayden and Blair became small nomads, bouncing between caregivers and their parents' impermanent households. The sisters learned to live in a state of unanticipated change, rocketing between the East Coast and Mexico.
"But our terrible mother gave Blair and me a wonderful life," Herrera insists. It's true that this life has led to a wonderful book. Herrera tells the story of her childhood through the voice of a child, never deviating from that point of view. She presents a social history of midcentury privilege and the history of two feckless parents who "believed in the importance of pleasure," in a narrative that is both detailed and riveting. --Janet Brown, author and former bookseller