Borrowed Finery

(Paperback)

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Description

Born in the 1920s to young, bohemian parents, Paula Fox was left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage. Rescued by her grandmother, Fox eventually landed with a gentle, poor minister in upstate New York. Uncle Elwood, as he came to be known, gave Paula a secure and loving home for many years, but her parents constantly re-surface. Her father is a good-looking, hard-drinking Hollywood screenwriter (among his credits is "The Last Train to Madrid", which Graham Greene declared was "the worst movie I ever saw"), and her mother, icily glamorous, is given to almost psychotic bursts of temper that punctuate a deep, disturbing indifference. They exercise, probably without even realising it, a sort of drip-drip cruelty, a cruelty by stealth, upon Paula, as they shuttle her from one exotic place to another, from a Cuban sugar plantation to Hollywood to Montreal to Florida, from relative to relative, never spending more than a few moments with her, maybe 2 days, maybe 2 weeks, before they leave her and move on.

Reviews

'Borrowed Finery is like being let into a living diary, full of glittering scenes that, as you turn to them, suddenly begin to move. It is a more humane, even-handed and entertaining book than many of the people involved had any right to expect.' The Times 'It is with amazement, approaching incredulity, that I read Paula Fox's account of being abandoned by her parents. Gripping and shocking.' The Sunday Times 'In less poised hands, this story could turn to self-pitying melodrama. Fox's telling, however, is as sharp and clean as a whiplash, piquing the reader's curiosity.' Herald 'A memoir of terrifying eloquence' Zoe Heller 'Reads like an American version of a Dickens novel, replete with cruel relatives, startling reversals of fortune and traumatic abandonments and reunions.' NY Times Magazine 'A beautifully written, unsparing, powerful memoir' O (Oprah Magazine) 'Inarguably great...her sentences are small miracles of compression, tiny novels in themselves' Jonathan Franzen

Author Bio

Paula Fox is the author of six novels, including Desperate Characters, The Widows Children, and Poor George. She is also a Newbery Award-winning childrens author. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.