An honest, funny, and thorough reflection on a complicated family.
In this memoir, a woman recounts her New York upbringing and investigates her father’s mob ties.
Goldberg’s book begins in 1987. One night, she and her then-husband, Mark, were in their New York City apartment, watching the local news. The lead story was about the murder of Irwin Schiff, who was shot in the head while dining at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. Schiff had ties to the mob, but the author knew him for another reason: “Irwin Schiff was one of my father’s best friends du jour.” Soon, the FBI was at her door, and Goldberg was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. “How the hell did I get to this point?” she asks incredulously. In the subsequent chapters, she jumps back in time to find out, sketching portraits of her parents and tracing her own upbringing. Her parents met in Brooklyn, fell in love, got married. Her father ran a sports-betting operation for Funzi Tieri, a notorious loan shark and “eventual capo of the Genovese family.” The author was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1958; six years later, the family moved to the Five Towns on Long Island. Soon, Goldberg had a sibling: “My sister was conceived after a night of drinking champagne at the Copacabana.” The memoir is full of details, anecdotes, and short profiles of colorful characters, but the author’s parents remain shrouded in lingering wisps of mystery. She can only speculate as to the scope and severity of her mother’s mental health struggles, and her father’s various business activities are never fully illuminated. For instance, Goldberg asserts that he was involved in the record industry for decades, but she didn’t learn about it until the 1980s. His work made him secretive, but the author sensed a resistance to settling down: “My dad did make a few attempts to fulfill my vision of suburban family life, but let’s just say, he wasn’t cut out for the part.”
Goldberg is a steady chronicler of her family history and the years of her childhood and adolescence. As one would expect from a mob-focused memoir, the names of fringe characters are delightful and might be hard to believe if not for the American familiarity, through film and television, with Mafia nomenclature. In these pages, readers meet Dom, Funzi, Tony Lunch, Johnny Sausage, and Benny Eggs. Though the author’s memoir delivers on its promise to present a realistic look at her father’s ties to the Genovese crime family, the true success of the work is how well it encapsulates a time and place: New York of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. Goldberg peppers the lively book, which includes family photographs, with mentions of bygone places: Schrafft’s; the Jade Cockatoo in Greenwich Village; the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens; Lundy’s Restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. She also powerfully evokes her suburban childhood, which, despite her father’s dealings, occasionally seems idyllic, as when she and some neighborhood kids played in the Valley Stream dump on Long Island: “We climbed on hills of dirt scattered with junk that included old bottles, rebar, shoes, and an occasional appliance.” Throughout the memoir, the author’s fondness for the past helps her soberly assess a sometimes chaotic, sometimes comical, and sometimes painful family life.
An honest, funny, and thorough reflection on a complicated family.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-58513-0
Page Count: 277
Publisher: O'Possum Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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