A New Yorker Best Book of 2021
A ātouching, heartbreaking, and exceptionalā (Town & Country) coming-of-age memoir by the daughter of artistic, bohemian parentsāset against a backdrop of 1950s New York, Cape Cod, and Mexico.
Hayden Herreraās 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 Herreraās mother called āupper bohemia,ā a milieu of people born to privilege who chose to focus on the life of the mind. Her parentsā 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, Herreraās childhood was idyllic and surreal. But underneath, the pain of being a parentās afterthought was acute. Upper Bohemia captures the tension between a childās 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 beautyāand 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 schoolāeventually following her mother to Mexico. The stepparents and stepsiblings kept changing too.
Intimate and honest, Upper Bohemia ācaptures an enchanted but erratic childhood in a rarefied milieu with the critical but appreciative eye of a seasoned art historianā (The Wall Street Journal). It is a celebration of a wild and pleasure-filled way of livingāand a poignant reminder of the toll such narcissism takes on the children raised in its grip.