Lost Property
Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A smart and hilarious memoir of privilege and excess told by the son of a powerful, seductive member of the New York elite.
Ben Sonnenberg grew up in the great house on Gramercy Park in New York City that his father, the inventor of modern public relations and the owner of a fine collection of art, built to celebrate his rise from the poverty of the Jewish Lower East Side to a life of riches and power. His son could have what he wanted, except perhaps what he wanted most: to get away.
Lost Property, a book of memoirs and confessions, is a tale of youthful riot and rebellion. Sonnenberg recounts his aesthetic, sexual, and political education, and a sometimes absurd flight into “anarchy and sabotage,” in which he reports to both the CIA and East German intelligence during the Cold War and, cultivating a dandy’s nonchalance, pursues a life of sexual adventure in 1960s London and New York. The cast of characters includes Orson Welles, Glenn Gould, and Sylvia Plath; among the subjects are marriage, children, infidelity, debt, divorce, literature, and multiple sclerosis.
The end is surprisingly happy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For much of his life, Sonnenberg, born in 1936, founder of the literary magazine Grand Street and son of one of the best-known public relations men in America, pursued ``fastidious disengagement''--``Reading books, buying art, writing unproduced plays, seducing women.'' His memoir originates in Sonnenberg's father's home at 19 Gramercy Park, a grand private residence in Manhattan. It is his family's ``showy, extravagant'' ways that Sonnenberg tries to transcend, finding that his liberation cannot begin until his parents die. Only after the house is sold in 1980 and his parents' estates settled does he begin work on Grand Street , which makes him ``happy, content and . . . proud.'' Also impelling change in his life is multiple sclerosis, which struck Sonnenberg at age 34, and his later marriage to his third wife. This is a dizzying yet quiet book. In some respects, Sonnenberg follows in the tradition of his favorite Continental autobiographers--Nabokov, Baudelaire, Stendhal--and presents a view of an artist's reactions to a kaleidoscopic world. But he also tells a fully American tale of will--how one tries to escape inherited surroundings and prove oneself through love and work.
