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

by Blythe Grossberg

Overview

“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

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. Blythe Grossberg brings us a captivating memoir about tutoring for Manhattan's elite that reveals how a life of extreme wealth both helps and harms the children of the One Percent.

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

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781335475206
Publisher:	Hanover Square Press
Publication date:	08/01/2023
Edition description:	First Time Trade
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

BLYTHE GROSSBERG, PsyD, is a learning specialist who has more than fifteen years of experience helping children and adults with ADHD and learning differences become more effective at school and at work. She has published several books, including Asperger’s Rules!, Focused: ADHD & ADD Parenting Strategies for Children with Attention Deficit Disorder and Making ADD Work: On-the-Job Strategies for Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Table of Contents

Author's Note 11

Chapter 1 The Doors of Fifth Avenue Open 13

Chapter 2 The Pie Chart 55

Chapter 3 Creating Harmony 87

Chapter 4 Hothouse Flowers 119

Chapter 5 Freud on Fifth Avenue 151

Chapter 6 The Lost Papers 177

Chapter 7 Stolen Moments 205

Chapter 8 The New College Try 217

Chapter 9 Citizenship 261

Chapter 10 Farewell, My Lovely 279

Endnotes 291

Acknowledgements 297

Editorial Reviews

05/24/2021

Learning specialist Grossberg (Autism and Your Teen) interweaves memoir, psychology, and exposé in this juicy yet sympathetic account of the 15 years she spent tutoring the privileged students of New York City’s elite private schools. When she took on private clients in addition to her full-time job working with students with ADHD and “learning differences” such as dyslexia, Grossberg developed a reputation as “a kind of tutoring messiah.” She delves into the high demand for tutors in New York, where some tutoring companies charge as much as $800 per hour, and describes the “endless strategy and conniving” that parents employ to get their children into “the Ivy League or Stanford.” Throughout, Grossberg spotlights the wealth gap between her and her students (one of whom gets ridiculed at the Brooklyn bodega where he tries to buy a $2 bagel with his father’s Amex Gold Card), but she also expresses genuine empathy for the pressures they and their parents face (The Great Gatsby is frequently invoked), shares inspiring stories of educational breakthroughs, and offers concrete advice on the college application process. This nuanced chronicle humanizes an oft-caricatured world. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

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

From the Publisher

03/01/2021

Dragged down by cancer, kidney failure, and recurring pneumonia, Pulitzer Prize winner Bragg had his heart lifted by The Speckled Beauty—a rambunctious stray dog who also needed love. In Seeing Ghosts, a study of grief and family, journalist Chow opens with emigration from China and Hong Kong to Cuba and America and moves to her mother's death from cancer (75,000-copy first printing). From award-winning news producer and photojournalist Copaken, author of the New York Times best-selling Shutterbabe, Ladyparts contextualizes soured marriage, solo parenting, and dating while ill with the substandard treatment of women by U.S. health care. In I Left My Homework in the Hamptons, Grossberg reveals exactly what it's like to tutor the children of New York's wealthiest families (50,000-copy first printing). Author of the New York Times best-booked Ten Thousand Saints, Henderson explores a long-term marriage that has survived her husband's struggles with physical and mental illness in Everything I Have Is Yours (75,000-copy first printing). Ranging from 38 Grand Slam titles to embracing her sexual identity at age 51, King details a life lived spectacularly in All In. In Honor Bound, McGrath recounts serving as the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marine Corps and efforts to unseat Mitch McConnell as Kentucky senator. Winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, Yangon, Myanmar-born, Bangkok- and San José-raised Myint's Names for Light probes silence, absence, and death over three generations of her family, defined by postcolonial struggle. In Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be, a Roxane Gay Audacious Bookclub November Pick, Perkins plumbs racism, wealth, poverty, beauty, and more from the perspective of a Southern Black woman. Qu's Made in China captures the challenges of an immigrant childhood, which included a mother so brutally demanding that Qu finally complained to New York's Office of Children and Family Services. In This Will All Be Over Soon, Saturday Night Live cast member Strong addresses grief over a close cousin's death from glioblastoma in the midst of the pandemic (75,000-copy first printing)..

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews