Books by Anne Roiphe
Water From The Well: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah
by Anne Roiphe
By retelling the stories of the Matriarchs through a sympathetic eye, Anne Roiphe will create portraits of the Bible’s women that will show how they played a role in Western history, how they taught us what is important and what is not, how they inspire our moral and immoral imaginations.
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Epilogue: A Memoir
From Anne Roiphe, the critically acclaimed author of Fruitful, comes the New York Times bestselling Epilogue, a beautiful memoir about death, life, and widowhood. Roiphe explores what happened when, at age 70, she lost her husband of 40 years. Moving between heartbreaking memories of her marriage and the pressing needs of a new day-to-day routine, Epilogue takes readers on her journey into the unknown world of life after love.
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Epilogue: A Memoir
Winner, The Rome Prize
Will Boast thought he'd lost his family, until a deeply held secret revealed a second chance he never thought he’d have. Having already lost his mother and only brother, twenty-four-year-old Will Boast finds himself absolutely alone when his father dies of alcoholism. Numbly settling the matters of his father's estate, Boast is deep inside his grief when he stumbles upon documents revealing a secret his father had intended to keep: He’d had another family before Will's―a wife and two sons in England.
This revelation leads to a flood of new questions. Did his father abandon this first family, or was he pushed away? Still reeling from loss, Boast is forced to reconsider the fundamental truths of his childhood and to look for traces of the man his father might truly have been. Setting out in search of his half brothers, he attempts to reconcile their family history with his own, testing each childhood memory under the weight of his father's secret. Moving between the Midwest and England, from scenes of his youth to the tentative discovery of his new family, Boast writes with visceral beauty about grief, memory, and his slow and tender journey to a new kind of love.
With the piercing gaze of a novelist, Boast transforms the pain and confusion of his family history into an achingly poignant portrait of resilience, revising the stories he's inherited to refashion both his past and his present. Heartbreaking and luminous, Epilogue is the stunning account of a young man’s struggle to understand all that he has lost and found, and to forge a new life for himself along the way.
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Epilogue: A Memoir
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed, San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly
Winner of the Rome Prize (John Guare Writer’s Fund)
“This remarkable memoir is written with extraordinary care, intelligence, and honesty.... In short, it’s fully alive.” ―Phillip Lopate
For Will Boast, what looked like the end turned out to be a new beginning. After losing his mother and only brother, twenty-four-year-old Boast finds himself absolutely alone when his father dies of alcoholism. Numbly settling the matters of his father’s estate, Boast stumbles upon documents revealing a closely guarded secret his father had meant to keep: he’d had another family entirely, a wife and two sons.
Setting out to find his half-brothers, Boast struggles to reconcile their family history with his own and to begin a chapter of his life he never imagined. “Riveting, soulful, and courageously told” (Maggie Shipstead), Epilogue is the stunning account of a young man’s journey through grief in search of a new, unexpected love.
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Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason
by Anne Roiphe
Coming of age on Park Avenue in the 1950s, Anne Roiphe had an adolescence entrenched in privilege, petticoats, and social rules. Young women at the time were expected to give up personal freedom for devotion to home and children. Instead, Roiphe chose Beckett, Proust, Sartre, and Mann as her heroes, and became one of the girls draped across the sofa at parties with George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, and William Styron, sometimes with her young child in tow. For a time she was satisfied to play the muse, but at the age of twenty-seven, divorced and finally freed of the notion that any sacrifice was worth making for art, she began to write. Here, in her clear-sighted, perceptive, and unabashed memoir, Roiphe shares with astonishing honesty the tumultuous adventure of self-discovery that finally led to her redemption.
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Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason
by Anne Roiphe
Luminous and intensely personal, Art and Madness recounts the lost years of Anne Roiphe’s twenties, when the soon-to-be-critically-acclaimed author put her dreams of becoming a writer on hold to devote herself to the magnetic but coercive male artists of the period.
Coming of age in the 1950s, Roiphe, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants, grew up on Park Avenue and had an adolescence defined by privilege, petticoats, and social rules. At Smith College her classmates wore fraternity pins on their cashmere sweaters and knit argyle socks for their boyfriends during lectures. Young women were expected to give up personal freedom for devotion to home and children. Instead, Roiphe chose Beckett, Proust, Sartre, and Mann as her heroes and sought out the chaos of New York’s White Horse Tavern and West End Bar.
She was unmoored and uncertain, “waiting for a wisp of truth, a feather’s brush of beauty, a moment of insight.” Salvation came in the form of a brilliant playwright whom she married and worked to support, even after he left her alone on their honeymoon and later pawned her family silver, china, and pearls. Her near-religious belief in the power of art induced her to overlook his infidelity and alcoholism, and to dutifully type his manuscripts in place of writing her own.
During an era that idolized its male writers, she became, sometimes with her young child in tow, one of the girls draped across the sofa at parties with George Plimpton, Terry Southern, Doc Humes, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, and William Styron. In the Hamptons she socialized with Larry Rivers, Jack Gelber and other painters and sculptors. “Moderation for most of us is a most unnatural condition . . . . I preferred to burn out like a brilliant firecracker.” But while she was playing the muse reality beckoned, forcing her to confront the notion that any sacrifice was worth making for art.
Art and Madness recounts the fascinating evolution of a time when art and alcohol and rebellion caused collateral damage and sometimes produced extraordinary work. In clear-sighted, perceptive, and unabashed prose, Roiphe shares with astonishing honesty the tumultuous adventure of self-discovery that finally led to her redemption.
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Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind: A Novel
by Anne Roiphe
In the rarefied world of New York City psychoanalysts and their patients, Dr. Estelle Berman belongs to a dying breed. A distinguished analyst who lives and practices on the Upper West Side, she inspires devotion among her patients. But she has started falling asleep during meetings and forgetting her patients' names. Her colleagues Dr. H. and Dr. Z. observe her mental decline with the objectivity of a Greek chorus, but when it comes to the disappointments in their own lives they are far less detached. And then there are the patients themselves: Justine, a movie star with a penchant for stealing things; Edith, who writes poems in secret and eats to subdue feelings of panic; Anna, a self-harming college student whose depression baffles her parents; and Mike Wilson, a widower whose disgraced son has fled the country. Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind is a novel of psychological realities, teeming humanity, and glorious contradictions.
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