Overview
Janet, My Mother, and Me is a charming, captivating memoir about a boy growing up in household of two extraordinary women. William Murray was devoted to his mother, Natalia Danesi Murray, and to his mother's longtime lover, writer Janet Flanner. Even as a teenager, he accepted their unconventional relationship. His portrait of the two most important people in his life is unforgettable.
Janet Flanner was already celebrated as the author of a new style of personal journalism for her "Letter from Paris: in The New Yorker when she met the Italian-born Natalia Murray on Fire Island, New York, in 1940. Their encounter, writes William Murray, was a "coup de foudre, a thunderbolt that instantly sent them rushing into each other's arms and forever altered their lives, as well as mine."
Murray was already growing up in two cultures on different continents, in New York and Rome, when his mother's life changed so dramatically. He quickly accepted Flanner and the unusual household in which he found himself. (Natalia's mother, Mammina Ester, also lived with them in New York.) His memories of the women and of his own boyhood and adolescence are touching and often hilarious.
Janet, My Mother, and Me offers a look at the world in which gay professional women moved in the decades before such relationships became more open and accepted. Murray's mother was a publishing executive and a broadcaster, and Murray, who originally hoped to become an opera singer and trained for that profession, eventually moved into the professions of both his mother and Flanner, becoming a novelist and then for many years an editor and writer at The New Yorker.
This is an exuberant, warm, and often poignant memoir with a memorable cast of characters. Beguiling and unusual, it will remain vivid in readers' minds for years to come.
About the Author:
William Murray was a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than thirty years. He is the author or translator of more than twenty books, both fiction and non-fiction, seven of which have been selected as New York Times notable books of the year. He lives in San Diego.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
When Janet Flanner, the New Yorker's Paris correspondent from 1925 to 1975, met Natalia Danesi Murray, who was to become her lover of 38 years, Flanner's wit was so radiant that even Natalia's son, who was 14 in 1940, "lingered for nearly an hour just to be around her." Intertwined with Murray's memorable portrait of the two women is his own gently self-deprecating coming of age story. He emerges as a lusty, headstrong young fellow, forever resisting his deeply possessive Italian mother, yet profoundly shaped by her and the cultured life they shared. Pursuing what became a dead-end career as an opera singer, he found in Flanner both an ally who tempered his mother's persistent criticism and "a sort of surrogate father." His admiration for Flanner's writing was a beacon that lit his path: he became a New Yorker staff writer for 30 years and the author of numerous novels (A Fine Italian Hand, etc.) and plays. Murray's descriptions of Flanner's often piercing insecurities and her devotion to her work are fascinating and inspiring; his less loving portrait of New Yorker editor William Shawn adds chiaroscuro. Drawing on Flanner's hauntingly articulate letters to Natalia, who assumed a succession of broadcasting, film and publishing positions in Italy as well as New York, Murray deftly conveys the interplay of passion, need and resolute independence that brought out the best and worst in their long-distance relationship. Although Murray's portrait of Flanner is crisper than that of his mother-perhaps due to the loss of Natalia's letters as well as her son's lingering ambivalence-this is a stirring account of the mature and enduring love between a mother, her lover and her son. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|Library Journal
Murray, a former staff writer at The New Yorker, here chronicles what it was like to be raised in a world presided over by two brilliant and forceful women, Natalia Danesi Murray and her longtime companion, New Yorker columnist Janet Flanner. Murray, who recognized the nature of his mother's relationship with Flanner in his adolescence, writes about accepting their lesbianism with equanimity and minimal interest--a rare accomplishment for a young man struggling with his own raging hormones. Moving back and forth among Paris, Rome, and New York, he writes about his family life against the background of World War II and its aftermath. And he includes material left out of Flanner and Natalia Murray's Darlinghissima (LJ 10/1/85), correcting the overly rosy portrait presented there. Scheduled for publication on The New Yorker's 75th anniversary, this book will be a useful addition to literature and gay studies collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/99.]--William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.Daly
Sparing no one, not even himself, Murray reconstructs a triangular relationship so intense and so intimately rendered that it is absolutely riveting. He studies Janet and Natalia's emotional history, gives us a glimpse of Flanner's genius, and explores his own bonds with these two amazing women with tenderness, insight, and great literary skill.—Entertainment Weekly
Francis M. Shonkwiler
Without glossing over quarrels, jealousies, or the couple's frustration at often living apart—and in a world the didn't recognize its "marriage"—this memoir is a clear-eyed and loving elegy.—Out
Johnson
A graceful memoir . . . A memento mori, a lesson in the ephemeral nature of fame, especially artistic fame . . . Murray picks his way among the events of his life and the affairs of his parents with admirable circumspection .—The New York Times Book Review