The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family
352The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family
352Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
As the century rolled on, however, the story of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit came to be viewed as glamorous and romantic, the darker narrative of White's out-of-control sexual compulsion obscured by time. Indeed, White's wife Bessie and his son Larry remained adamantly silent about the matter for the duration of their lives, a silence that reverberated through the next four generations of their extended family.
Suzannah Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's great grandchildren. It was only in her 30's that she began to sense the parallels between the silence about her great-grandfather's life and the silence about her own perilous experience as a little girl in her own home. Thus she became drawn to the remarkable history of her family in order to uncover its hidden truths, and in so doing to liberate herself from its enclosure at last. The result is a multi-layered memoir of astonishing elegance and power, one that, like a great building, is illumined room by room, chapter by chapter, until the whole is clearly seen.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780385319423 |
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Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 10/06/1997 |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 352 |
Sales rank: | 769,566 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
When I was a little girl, I liked to go into a formal garden of box bushes that lay just to the west of my grandparents’ house. The box garden, as it was called, was on a terrace that was significantly lower than the house and thus apart, in a zone of its own. The hedges that lined the paths had grown high and billowy, so that they were over my head, and in some places had grown so close together that I had to push my way through. The bushes would then spray me with their gritty dust, and I’d smell the sharp-smelling box-bush decay rising from the damp ground where no sun reached, and see up close the way the leaves were bunched in kernels like tiny loose cabbages. It seems to me now that my family story was all there always, everywhere, layered away, as in the kernels of box, and that I absorbed it somatically—took it in through my pores with the gritty box dust.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Architect of Desire"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Suzannah Lessard.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
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