IT WAS HER NEW YORK

A simple, poetic memoir pays tribute to Manhattan and to the author’s mother, who lived life to the fullest there.

As the health of our parents falters, we inevitably reflect on the lessons we have learned from them over a lifetime. This mood of introspection permeates Moed’s remembrance, which also acts as a portrait of the tough ethos of the Lower East Side, where the author and her sister grew up. Central to the memoir is the author’s bond with her late mother, Florence, and how the two women’s lives influenced and paralleled each other. Florence emerges as a remarkable force of nature in Moed’s portrayal: a determined, principled, artistic, and, above all, resilient woman. As the author describes her, she’s “the woman who could rush through her city and her life in that ferocious stride of hers—nothing stopping her, walking for miles and hours to save carfare so she could blow it on the new special at Wendy’s.” Early on, the author writes, Florence was deeply conflicted as a lesbian in the mid-20th century who, at the behest of her lover, married a man and raised two daughters. Florence eventually got a divorce and embraced the city’s LGBTQ+ scene with a passion, while continuing to teach piano and raise her children as a single mother. She was a fixture at Pride parades and, later in life, took part in dances at the local gay and lesbian senior citizen’s center, where she “broke many hearts of many old girls.” As she grew older and struggled with dementia, her candid demeanor never wavered. In these pages, Moed effectively presents a document of her mother’s final years, interspersing vignettes of her own childhood and the changing city in which she and her mother lived. The result is a stellar narrative about life, loss, and the sense of commitment that parents and children share. Along the way, readers will feel immersed in the New York of the past and present, pictured in the author’s casual but skillfully rendered photographs, interspersed with older images by others.

A heartfelt account of motherhood, womanhood, and the big city.