The Clancys of Queens

by Tara Clancy

Overview

Fifth-generation New Yorker, third-generation bartender, and first-generation author Tara Clancy was raised in three wildly divergent homes: a converted boat shed in working class Queens, a geriatric commune of feisty, Brooklyn-born Italians, and a sprawling Hamptons estate she visited every other weekend. This childhood triptych comes to life in The Clancys of Queens, an electric, one-of-a-kind memoir.   
 
From scheming and gambling with her force-of-nature grandmother, to brawling with eleven-year-old girls on the concrete recess battle yard of MS 172, to hours lounging on Adirondack chairs beside an immaculate croquet lawn, to holding court beside Joey O’Dirt, Goiter Eddy, and Roger the Dodger at her Dad’s local bar, Tara leapfrogs across these varied spheres, delivering stories from each world with originality, grit, and outrageous humor.
 
But The Clancys of Queens is not merely an authentic coming-of-age tale or a rowdy barstool biography. Chock-full of characters who escape the popular imaginings of this city, it offers a bold portrait of real people, people whose stories are largely absent from our shelves. Most crucially, it captures—in inimitable prose—the rarely-heard voices of New York’s working-class women.
 
With a light touch but a hard hit, The Clancys of Queens blends savvy and wit to take us on an unforgettable strata-hopping adventure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101903117
Publisher:	Crown/Archetype
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Tara Clancy's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times Magazine, and The Rumpus. She has told several stories on The Moth Radio Hour, and has hosted their live shows in New York City and throughout the country. Her stories have also been featured on NPR’s Snap Judgment, Risk! and The Story Collider, among other programs. Tara was born and raised in Queens. This is her first book. 
 
www.taraclancy.com

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Editorial Reviews

07/25/2016
Clancy’s debut, an intimate coming-of-age chronicle, captures the circumstances of her multi-class upbringing as the neighborhood “rat” of the Broad Channel section of Queens, N.Y.; a part-time member of “the Geriatrics of 251st Street”; and a weekender at the upscale seaside community of Bridgehampton. The reader navigates through this lighthearted memoir with the help of a sharp-tongued, hip-hop-loving sneaker enthusiast whose relentless attempts at disrupting the tranquility of nearly every situation make up the bulk of the antics covered in the book’s 21-year sprawl. The rest come from an eclectic cast of friends and family that include Grandma Rosalie Riccobono, an Italian-American matriarch whose colorful curses serve as her everyday punctuation; Rosemary, a self-described “rebellious, alcoholic, soon-to-be-heroin-addict, giant butch built of tough Rockaway Irish stock”; and the regulars at Gregory’s Bar and Restaurant, the nautical-themed neighborhood watering hole. Set against the grunge and rap backdrop of the late 1980s and early ’90s Queens, the heart of Clancy’s thoroughly enjoyable narrative lies in her examination of life in the spaces between social classes, and the threads of humanity shared equally by the local pothead high schoolers, antique-collecting Hamptons businessmen, and the Irish-American cops of New York City. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-08-21
A sentimental journey through the author’s childhood.Recollections of childhood are often gauzy half-remembrances that yield to selective memory. However, many authors are able to remain objective in their search through the past. In her debut book, writer and performer Clancy provides an impartial account of her life growing up in the outer reaches of Queens, but by stringing together a series of vignettes and remembrances rather than a thematically driven narrative, the recollections read more like an extended monologue. Growing up in an apartment with her mother in Bellerose, Queens, Clancy spent every other weekend at her police officer father’s cramped Broad Channel home and other weekends at the Hamptons estate of her mother’s boyfriend. Unfortunately, the novelty of these juxtapositions is short-lived. Skipping around in years, the author tells the story of her parents, the peculiarities of her grandparents, and the questionable decisions of her adolescence, which included smoking cigarettes and marijuana and regularly drinking while at school. In addition to her tales of adolescence, Clancy broaches the subject of her burgeoning homosexuality, chronicling a trip she and her mother took to visit her mother’s lesbian friend in Los Angeles. It was not until she was 19 that Clancy had her first girlfriend and came out to her parents. (Mom was fine. Dad, reluctantly accepted: “Ah, screw it. At least now we have two things in common—whiskey and women!”) Though Clancy’s story will strike a nerve with a particular strand of Gen Y who experienced the rap and grunge waves as high schoolers in the 1990s, there is not enough charm in the narrative to overcome the lack of focus and cohesion throughout her reflections. At times funny and touching, Clancy’s recollections from her childhood are otherwise all too familiar in their mundanity.

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Tara Clancy’s THE CLANCYS OF QUEENS

“The Clancys of Queens overflows with buoyant exuberance…[and] much of its magic lies in its narrator’s frank, funny voice and evident passion for a good story…. [It’s] a winningly sunny tribute to the strong ties of kinship…[and] Clancy has the literary prowess to do it justice.” 
–Elle 


“The oddities of Clancy’s upbringing make for some hilarious passages, but each chapter also forms a love letter—to her parents, Grandma Rosalie, Mark, her friends and lovers…. A breezy, funny memoir with a wonderful cast of characters and a terrific sense of place.”
–BookPage


“Affectionate [and] well-observed.” 
–Newsday 

“Clancy’s keen observational humor and authentic working-class New Yawkese survive the transition from stage to page as she crafts a love letter to the family that raised her…Clancy sketches these people with telling details and great affection…That Clancy’s personal chronicle is not the bright shiny output of the memoir industrial complex is somewhat of a relief; instead we get an anthropological report of a disappearing world of white, ethnic, working-class New Yorkers, and we hear from working-class women who are often silent in literature.”
–The Rumpus

“Hilarious, inspiring, and that rarest of animals—a memoir full of honest good cheer…. [Clancy] writes with the confidence of a practiced raconteur….[Her life is] exceptional in its realness and resilience, and tremendous in the telling.”
—Lambda Literary

“Tara Clancy’s debut has it all—humor, fascinating characters, glimpses into radically different lifestyles, intergenerational strife and celebration, insightful Hamptons references—and hope, lotsa hope….This rich memoir reminds the reader that we are all many people.”
—Dan's Papers

“Tara Clancy delivers a memoir with warmth, truth and chutzpah that makes The Clancys of Queens a fun read. She finds the heart and life that epitomize Queens in a way that will delight both New Yorkers and outsiders alike…Clancy not only does a beautiful job rendering the different stages on which she lived her childhood, but also excels at emphasizing the dissonance between them…Clancy offers a lighthearted look at growing up among the salt-of-the-earth in America, and The Clancys of Queens does what all good memoirs do: It begins from the unique situation of a life and fans out to reveal the feelings we all share.”
—Bookreporter.com

“An intimate coming-of-age chronicle...[from] a sharp-tongued, hip-hop-loving sneaker enthusiast whose relentless attempts at disrupting the tranquility of nearly every situation make up the bulk of the antics in the book's 21-year sprawl... The heart of Clancy’s thoroughly enjoyable narrative lies in her examination of life in the spaces between social classes, and the threads of humanity shared equally by the local pothead high schoolers, antique-collection Hamptons businessmen, and the Irish-American cops of New York City.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In this laugh-out-loud memoir…Clancy’s writing crackles with wit and candor…. As Clancy whirls with feverish tomboy energy from one escapade to the next, she gives a fantastically vivid view into her many worlds.”
—Booklist


“Clancy's story will strike a nerve…funny and touching.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The fierce voices of working class women are too often inaudible in our top-down social economy, but when Tara Clancy breaks through, she dazzles us with authenticity, hilarity, and insight.  The relentless honesty of her book will capture your heart.”
 —Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

 
“This memoir is blessed by a narrating voice of such vivid originality the reader cannot help but relish the life it details.”
 —Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City


“Real people’s stories are more interesting than fiction because real American life is full of weird connections, from city to country, from Queens to Montana, from high-class to low-class, from straight world to underworld. Ms. Clancy’s rambunctious memoir is a buster of artificial barriers. She goes global, widening the mind. Her setting—the Byzantium of Queens—is the place to do it. I love this memoir for its brash heroine, her bracing voice, her love of her father, her unquiet soul, and the social history she gives of a violent, energetic, fast-evolving world—which is bigger than most people can imagine.”
—Atticus Lish, author of Preparation for the Next Life


“Tara Clancy's freewheeling memoir is a refreshing look at New York City, one that crosses many bridges: the ones between boroughs and the ones between social classes. The Clancys of Queens is one woman's story, but it also captures the vitality and sense of possibility of the city.” 
—Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them


“Tara Clancy is my new favorite bad ass. The Clancys of Queens is a hilarious love letter to my favorite city and to working class families everywhere.”  
—Stephen Adly Guirgis, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Between Riverside and Crazy


“I’d been introduced to Tara Clancy by her stories on The Moth, but I was innocent of the joys of her prose. In The Clancys of Queens, indelible moments tumble upon moments even more memorable until they form a blissful cascade as she recounts a New York City childhood that teeters from hardscrabble to posh. I defy you not smile for the length of this book! I loved it.” 
—Jon Cryer, actor and author of So That Happened

From the Publisher

From her first utterance, Tara Clancy evokes belly laughs as she recounts her uncommon life from ages 5 to 18. She spent part of the time in a Queens boathouse belonging to her Irish dad, part of the time in the Brooklyn home of her working-class Italian grandparents, and weekends in the Hamptons with her mother. Clancy’s character portrayals are convincing, with the standouts being her dynamic, droll father and hilarious Grandma Riccobono, whose colorful curses and outsize personality overshadow even Clancy. Listeners will enthusiastically join Clancy at her dad’s local bar, in a limo en route to the Hamptons, and in a number of locations during her “lost” teen years, in which she found herself by stumbling onto a copy of KING LEAR. In the epilogue she introduces her wife and two kids, making listeners sad to leave a delightful friend. S.G.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2016 - AudioFile