I Left My Homework in the Hamptons: What I Learned Teaching the Children of the One Percent

by Blythe Grossberg Narrated by Ann Marie Gideon

Overview

A captivating memoir about tutoring for Manhattan¿s elite, revealing how a life of extreme wealth both helps and harms the children of the one percent.

Ben orders daily room service while living in a five-star hotel. Olivia collects luxury brand sneakers worn by celebrities. Dakota jets off to Rome when she needs to avoid drama at school.

Welcome to the inner circle of New York¿s richest families, where academia is an obsession, wealth does nothing to soothe status anxiety and parents will try just about anything to gain a competitive edge in the college admissions rat race.

When Blythe Grossberg first started as a tutor and learning specialist, she had no idea what awaited her inside the high-end apartments of Fifth Avenue. Children are expected to be as efficient and driven as CEOs, starting their days with 5:00 a.m. squash practice and ending them with late-night tutoring sessions. Meanwhile, their powerful parents will do anything to secure one of the precious few spots at the Ivy Leagues, whatever the cost to them or their kids.

Through stories of the children she tutors that are both funny and shocking, Grossberg shows us the privileged world of America¿s wealthiest families and the systems in place that help them stay on top.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Grossberg’s fascinating book offers a rare glimpse into the school struggles of the wealthiest kids in New York, reading The Great Gatsby and living through it at the same time.” –Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to be Wrong and Shape

"Blythe Grossberg’s illuminating memoir, I Left My Homework in the Hamptons, offers a riveting and heartfelt look into her time tutoring the children of some of the wealthiest families in New York City. With clarity and compassion, Grossberg illustrates how, in so many instances, just beneath the surface of these families’ gilded social media images are much more complex stories that too often involve dysfunction, loneliness and heartbreak. Like all of the best memoirs, Grossberg’s compelling personal story is unique, but includes elements that will resonate with all readers. I highly recommend it!"
-Jane Healey, bestselling author of The Beantown Girls

“A fascinating book about the world of elite schools and students — the competition and stressors of the rich, the downside of too much wealth and too little joy — all told through the stories of the young people who live in this world by an engaging, gifted, and empathic storyteller. Part memoir, part sociological study of the rich, part a treatise on education in America....but 100% compelling. Despite the singularity of the students, the questions this book poses are universal. How much is too much? Why do we require students to master things they are not yet capable of doing? How does the education of the rich exacerbate problems of class, race, and equality in ways that might make broader solutions more difficult? I couldn't put it down.” - Ellen Braaten, PhD, author of Bright Kids Who Can't Keep Up, Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School


“Grossberg interweaves memoir, psychology, and exposé in this juicy yet sympathetic account…. This nuanced chronicle humanizes an oft-caricatured world.” -Publishers Weekly


“With compassion and humor, Grossberg details the cutthroat ways the elite try to catapult their children to the top no matter the monetary (or emotional) cost. Despite the glittering exterior of this lifestyle, Grossberg explores an underbelly of insecurity, pain, and dysfunction.” -Town & Country Magazine


'A sobering close-up of parental wealth and power." -Kirkus Reviews

"Grossberg writes most incisively and movingly when she describes her own struggles as the parent of a child with autism... This insight helps her to understand, but not necessarily to accept, the lengths to which parents will go to secure safety and success for their children.” -The East Hampton Star

Kirkus Reviews

2021-06-16
A tutor gives low grades to rich, meddlesome parents of the New York prep schoolers she calls “Gatsby’s children.”

Grossberg taught for years at an elite Manhattan prep school while moonlighting as a tutor for middle and high schoolers who might return from a weekend “and report that they had been introduced to Bono at a concert and had gone skiing.” She recalls her alternately rewarding and maddening experiences, focused on students with learning differences, in a book that “has elements of memoir.” She uses composite characters to show how the ultrarich work—or game—a system that favors families who can afford space camp and “$800—per hour” SAT tutors. Lily’s mother demands that a school let her daughter retake a test because the proctor miscalculated the allotted time by one minute. Trevor’s father expects after-school tutor Grossberg to know whether his son uses his ADHD accommodations at school because “I’m not home enough to collect more than core samples on my son.” Sophie’s mother plays “the legal card” so her daughter can redo a paper after her father is charged with unrelated financial missteps in the New York Times. Students suffer from the interference by “litigious and combative” parents of Gatsby-like wealth: “The result of all this meddling in their children’s lives…is that many kids achieve beyond their ability, so that tutoring has to follow them to college.” Some children deal with anxiety, depression, exhaustion, or White privilege (they resent having to watch the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize in class). Grossberg’s novelistic flourishes (“She pauses for a minute and licks her lips nervously”) can be distracting, but most of her stories ring true and insightfully support her broad point that fear drives the parental excesses: “These parents, having achieved the apogee of success and wealth, have nowhere to go but down.”

A sobering close-up of parental wealth and power—and the children hurt by it—at tony Manhattan schools.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176383553
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/17/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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