Borrowed Finery

by Paula Fox

Overview

Pointillist in detail, lapidary in method and brutal in effect...an eloquent, disturbing memoir." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

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. 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 of this astonishing memoir of one writer's unusual beginnings, which was instantly recognized as a modern classic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466850149
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/23/2013
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	303 KB

About the Author

Paula Fox (1923-2017) is the author of the memoirs The Coldest Winter and Borrowed Finery, six novels, and a number of children's and young adult books, including the Newberry Award-winning children's book, The Slave Dancer. She lived in Brooklyn, New York.

Hometown:

Brooklyn, New York

Date of Birth:

April 22, 1923

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended Columbia University

Read an Excerpt

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 third presence between them. I knew that trunk; I'd seen it in Provincetown years earlier.

Paula Fox is the author of the novels Poor George, Desperate Characters, The Western Coast, The Widow's Children, A Servant's Tale, and The God of Nightmare. She is also a Newbery Award-winning children's book author. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

Dumped at birth in a Manhattan orphanage, Paula Fox spent her early years under the care of a poor, cultivated minister in upstate New York. And then her parents resurfaced. To outsiders, this nomadic pair seemed colorful: Her father was a handsome, well-regarded screenwriter, and both earned reputations as hard-partying bohemians. But their young daughter paid a price for her parents' free-footed unconventionality. Shunted from place to place, from foster homes to relatives, she created herself from the borrowed finery of half strangers. The Los Angeles Times called this perceptive memoir "restrained yet unsparing".

bn.com

Acclaimed novelist Fox (Desperate Characters, reprinted 1999, etc.) describes with astonishing detachment a peripatetic childhood buffeted by the whims of her neurotic parents. Fox's alcoholic father, Paul, left her in a Manhattan foundling home days after her birth in 1923 at the insistence of her 19-year-old mother, Elsie, "panic-stricken and ungovernable in her haste to have done with me." Taken in by a kindly Congregational minister, who raised her in the small town of Balmville, New York, Paula was subjected to occasional alarming excursions with her parents. In a New York hotel, when the little girl observed there was no milk with her dinner, Paul took the tray and dropped it out a window. When she was six, they removed her from the minister's nurturance; Fox describes this parting as "an amputation." By the time she was 18, she'd lived in Hollywood, in Kew Gardens, Long Island, with her Spanish grandmother (and several uncles as bizarre as their sister, Elsie), in Cuba, Florida, New Hampshire, and at a boarding school in Montreal. Most of these moves were abruptly decreed by Elsie or Paul (they divorced when Paula was 12) for motives Fox does not attempt to analyze. She delineates her own emotions with delicate restraint, and her prose is as fine as in her fiction. (On a California earthquake: "For moments, the world's heart had stopped.") This would be an unbearably sad story if not for paragraphs subtly interspersed throughout that show young Paula discovering the pleasure of words and the power of literature, which "calmed my turbulence, eased my restlessness and shame." When she was 21, Fox too had an unwanted baby, but the book's final pages show her reunited with thedaughter she gave up for adoption. Without a hint of facile optimism, Fox suggests you can not only survive a traumatic past but learn from it. Austere yet painfully moving: a refreshing contrast to the spate of whiny memoirs currently crowding bookstore shelves.

Kirkus Reviews

Pointillist in detail, lapidary in method and brutal in effect...an eloquent, disturbing memoir.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Original and elegant...A celebration of resilience—both of character and of the memoir form.” —Sandra Scofield, Chicago Tribune

“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

From the Publisher