From National Book Award nominee Anne Roiphe comes this moving memoir of growing up in a wealthy Jewish home with a family who had money, status, culture -- everything but happiness.
While the nation was at war abroad, Roiphe, who was coming of age in 1940s New York City, saw her parents at war in their living room. Roiphe's evocative writing puts readers right in Apartment 8C, where a constant tension plays out between a disappointed and ineffectual mother, a philandering father who uses his wife's money to entertain other women, and a difficult brother. Behind the leisure culture of...

We live in a world where the concept of marriage is an unfashionable one. This work gives us an unfettered view of an institution which continues to play an important role in our lives. It offers a defence of married life from the perspective of a wife and mother. It is a tribute not only to what marriage asks of us, but also to what it gives us.