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Leaving Home: A Memoir

Name: Leaving Home: A Memoir
Author: Art Buchwald
ISBN: 9780786201587

by Art Buchwald

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Overview

Funny men don't necessarily have funny childhoods. Art Buchwald had to find his humor the hard way. In this poignant memoir, Buchwald writes with intimacy and candor about his early years - of a life constantly on the move, in the company of strangers. "Shortly after I was born, my mother was taken away from me or I was taken from my mother," he begins, as he tells of a childhood that took him from a Seventh-Day Adventist shelter to New York's Hebrew Orphan Asylum to a series of foster homes - all before the age of fifteen. It was an experience that forever molded him. "By the time I was six or seven, I said to myself, 'This is ridiculous. I think I'll become a humorist.'" To defend himself, Buchwald wove real-life adventures with fantasies and dreams worthy of Holden Caulfield, whom the columnist still insists worked one side of the street while he worked the other. Then, at seventeen, he ran away and joined the U.S. Marines, served in the Pacific, enrolled at the University of Southern California when the war ended (although he did not have a high school diploma), and finally wound up in Paris on the GI Bill. Exactly how he negotiated the rocky path from the dining hall at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum to the best table at Maxim's in Paris is a memorable story, told by a man who has made America laugh for forty years. Never have his skills as a storyteller been put to more affecting use than in the pages of Leaving Home.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Buchwald here delivers a bright, funny and poignant memoir of his early years, from a lonely childhood in Queens, New York City, to his start as a Herald-Tribune columnist in postwar Paris. He never saw his Hungarian-born, mentally ill mother, who was institutionalized shortly after his birth in 1925. His father, a Yiddish-speaking Austrian immigrant, a drape hanger, was a devoted parent, but was forced to place the author and his sisters in foster homes. It was a life with ``no hugging,'' but Buchwald survived through humor born of much anger and sadness (``This stinks. I'm going to become a humorist,'' he told himself), eventually fleeing to join the Marine Corps in 1942. His later years would be ``a lifelong search'' for a surrogate mother and included two suicidal depressions. We see the development of a young writer in a book rich in incidents and rendered in wonderfully vivid scenes: Buchwald rollerskating down Queens Boulevard, losing his virginity to a hotel chambermaid, pulling burial detail as a Marine in the Marshall Islands, aspiring to screenwriting at the University of Southern California, where he studied on the G.I. Bill, and finally sipping Pernod in Hemingway-heady Parisian cafes on the eve of the 1950s. ``I am new at writing memoirs,'' declares the author of this mature, immensely appealing look back at a youth of ``luck and chutzpah.'' He is very good at it, too. (Jan.)

Library Journal

A third of the way through this autobiography, syndicated columnist Buchwald says that when people ask what he's trying to do with humor, he tells them he's ``getting even, avenging the hurts of the past.'' Written in fine, firm prose that never bursts into fireworks nor falls from grace, his ``coming of age'' memoir is a mingling of tragedy and comedy, a revealing self-portrait that is unsparing of himself and uncolored by sentimentality. No chapter in the book fails to offer a full yield of fascination, whether the subject is his relationship with his father and sisters, his days in foster homes, his years as a Marine, or his early writing experiences in Paris. Leaving Home will strengthen Buchwald's reputation. It answers beautifully the invitation, ``Tell me about yourself.'' Recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/93.-- A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston

Denise Donavin

One could easily think Buchwald's ready wit and trenchant sarcasm sprang from a childhood full of laughter and a household full of siblings competing for parental approval. Not exactly. With his mom hospitalized for mental distress before and directly after his birth, and his dad struggling to sustain a drapery and upholstery business decimated both by the Depression and medical bills, Buchwald's early years were spent with relatives (paid for the task) and in foster care. His is an overwhelmingly sad tale, brightened only by his determination from a very early age to make people laugh. Coming to maturity, Buchwald ran off to join the marines; his story that he joined on the rebound, after being rejected by his summertime love, Flossie, has the resonance of a well-honed anecdote. Perhaps his recognition, after undergoing analysis, that he was searching for a father-figure--or, at least, a reliable and structured community--is more accurate. Regardless, Buchwald's account of his unsuitability for the marines adds a great deal of necessary comic relief to a fine memoir.

Kirkus Reviews

Humorist Buchwald turns serious, albeit not wholly so, in this affecting memoir of his painful youth and early manhood. Shortly after she bore him in 1925, Buchwald's emigrant mother was committed to a psychiatric institution, where she was to spend the rest of her life. The author's father, an impoverished draper, couldn't afford to make a home for young Art and his three older sisters, so the children shuttled about N.Y.C.'s foster-care system for most of the Depression. Finally, in 1939, Buchwald pŠre was able to reunite the family in a Queens apartment. In the meantime, however, his son had developed a fiddlefoot, the soul of a hustler, and a rich fantasy life. WW II gave him a chance to leave a hurtful past behind, and he took it, lying about his age to enlist in the Marines. After returning unscathed from the Pacific (where he served as an ordnance specialist in a fighter squadron), Sgt. Buchwald took his discharge and used the GI Bill to enroll at USC. Despite discovering that he lacked a high-school diploma, the university allowed him to attend classes as a special student. But after three fulfilling years there, Buchwald learned that his government stipend could be used to study in Paris. He transferred almost immediately and found the City of Light much to his liking. In relatively short order, he gained employment as a Variety stringer and convinced a Herald Tribune editor to let him write a column for $25 a week. At the close of this memoir, he's typing "Paris After Dark" by Art Buchwald.... An often brutally frank account in which Buchwald reveals an affecting capacity for reflection without lapsing into pathos or losing the light touch that's gained him fame and fortune.The rest of the story can't come soon enough. (First serial to Parade)