THE GREEN ROAD * PRIMATES OF PARK AVENUE

I've just started to read a book about fashion, and it got me to thinking and pondering and wanting to blog about it and me and my fashion history which I am not calling "so-called" even though I could. It starts before you were born with the pictures of your grandmothers that look old fashioned before you realize that those one off photos taken at photography studios were all about fashion. Then you're born and it's about how your mom dresses you. Fashion continues through school years when either mom or you prevail in all matters of  your personal style. Mom and female relatives are older, but do they really have a personal style? Vogue magazine is always on the family room counter alongside Life, Time and Reader's Digest. Two newspapers fed into our house, and we only shopped at Saks, Bonwit's, Hudson's Downtown or Northland and Jacobsons. Looking back, it was always there, unspoken. I've already got the label, so I must have said something about it before this (I wonder if I applied the Fashion label to the flannel nightgown I so humbly and proudly displayed here some years ago.) I can never remember whether the period goes before or after the parenthesis. 

The Green Road by Anne Enright - Whoa - talk about your mother issues. Rosaleen is the matriarch of the Madigan family, whose individual stories make up the chapters in this readable novel. Make no mistake, though, this woman is all there all the time, pulling the strings whether she knows it or not. Yes, this is the cover, but the author's Booker Prize and the flyleaf offering up Ireland are what got me. Don't say I didn't tell you.
Primates of Park Avenue a memoir by Wednesday Martin - First of all, despite the cover, this is not chic-lit. It's too long, with long long descriptions of animals in the wild and how they behave. But the moms of the Upper East Side aren't animals in the wild - they are humans with a code. The author was determined to break into their ranks however conflicted she was about doing so. She found out what we already know - that people are people no matter where they are and how they look. What she didn't tell us about were the kind and nice moms who were in the shadows of the cool ones, and who would have been there for her if she'd only thought to seek them out. I know they were there.