Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Upper Bohemia: A Memoir

Upper Bohemia: A Memoir

Herrera, Hayden

Paperback

Biographies GeneralSelf-Help

Publisher Price: $17.99

ISBN10: 1982105291
ISBN13: 9781982105297
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: Jun 21 2022
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.81 Width: 5.63 Depth: 8.36
Language: English
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker

A touching, heartbreaking, and exceptional (Town & Country) coming-of-age memoir about growing up with artistic, bohemian parents--set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, Cape Cod, and Mexico.

Hayden Herrera's 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 Herrera's mother called upper bohemia, a milieu of people born to privilege who chose to focus on the life of the mind. Her parents' 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, Herrera's childhood was idyllic and surreal. But underneath, the pain of being a parent's afterthought was acute. Upper Bohemia captures the tension between a child's 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 beauty--and 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 school--eventually following her mother to Mexico. The stepparents and stepsiblings kept changing too.

Intimate and honest, Upper Bohemia is a family memoir that captures an enchanted but erratic childhood in a rarefied milieu with the critical but appreciative eye of a seasoned art historian (The Wall Street Journal). It is a celebration of a wild and pleasure-filled way of living--and a poignant reminder of the toll such narcissism takes on the children raised in its grip.

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