Thank you for helping BOOKS FOR THE WIN reach 100 subscribers and our first giveaway winner. This time the random number generator came up with subscriber 73. Want to know if you’re number 73? Curious about our next book, which is so up my alley that I’m kicking myself for not writing it? Read on!
We are told that children lose their imagination as they grow up. I’m not sure that is true.
When I was twelve my parents took me to see Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott. Dead author’s houses had never interested me much, despite the fact that I earned the nickname “book maggot” from a droll family friend who felt “bookworm” was insufficient. I remember looking at Alcott’s tiny desk and straining to feel something that would connect me to her the way Little Women did. Nothing came. No ghostly presence hailed me across time. No still-fingerprinted pen rested where she had last cast it. I simply could not imagine Alcott in that place.
Now I can.
I not only can, but sometimes when visiting the homes of the great and the good, I have to cease speaking to hide the clutch of tears in my voice. Maybe it is an increasing awareness of my own mortality – a more lived-in sense of connection to the material world. I don’t know. But when I began Paulina Bren’s 2021 The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free, I knew that if I ever get to 140 East 63rd Street, NYC, I may not be able to speak at all.
140 East 63rd is not just one famous person’s former home, but many. Under its awning passed Molly Brown of Titanic fame, who moved in right when it opened in 1928. 1947 saw Grace Kelly landing her first modeling gig through Barbizon connections while studying acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. 1954 brought Sylvia Plath amidst a pillbox-hatted tide of Mademoiselle guest editors – an angsty experience that Plath would later immortalize in her only novel, The Bell Jar. Two years after Plath it was Joan Didion. Then Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, and the list goes on.
Yet for every starlet there was a stenographer, remembered by a smaller circle but still playing her role in women’s liberation. To send a daughter into the city alone would have been unthinkable just a few decades before, and The Barbizon assured anxious parents that no man ever passed its lobby. This was not strictly true. Reports of men disguised as gynecologists or plumbers in order to visit a lady’s chamber were legendary, but probably never highlighted in young women’s letters home. Despite these hijinks, however, The Barbizon was largely what it purported to be – a safe harbor for a new kind of woman, seeking, as Virginia Woolf had said in the previous century, “a room of one’s own.”
Then there were “the Women,” long-term residents that younger lodgers dismissed as the hotel’s cautionary tales. By glamorous Barbizon advertising logic, the hotel was temporary – a springboard to the halls of fame or a wealthy husband. The Women felt differently, making The Barbizon a permanent home. When developers got hold of the building in the early 2000s, the Women refused to leave. There they remain, their rent-controlled floor sandwiched between the exorbitantly-priced condos that the rest of the Barbizon has, predictably, become.
What I like best about Bren’s book is the vividness with which it deploys the genre of my own forthcoming book – microhistory. Microhistory draws on a small slice of the past to tell a bigger story. In The Barbizon’s case, the tale of a single hotel can, with considerable flair, stand in for the whole trajectory of women’s liberation. As Bren herself puts it, the book is “at once a history of the singular woman who passed through its doors, a history of Manhattan through the twentieth century, and a forgotten story of women’s ambition.”
As I read The Barbizon, I found myself drawn through a lobby full of eager men, up past the mezzanine from which their gloved and hatted dates spied down on them. In the residential halls, women in chenille robes huddled around built-in radios or the hotel’s one tiny television set, munching from delicatessen boxes and chatting about their hopes, dreams, and another day’s work. It is history, but it is not hard to imagine.
If you’d like to win a copy of The Barbizon, consider sharing this post with friends. I’ll give it away to a randomly-selected winner once BOOKS FOR THE WIN reaches 200 subscribers.
Last but not least, the winner of giveaway #1, Jim DeFede’s The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland, is ki*****pel@comcast.net. If that’s your address, send me a message to claim your prize!
I had 2 of these 3 books on my TBR list already and now I've added the 3rd. And maybe I'll move them to the top of the list! So excited to get a peek at your newest venture and anticipating some great reading!