Sleeping Arrangements

From the acclaimed novelist, playwright, and journalist Laura Cunningham, a coming of age story and enchanting memoir of childhood

"Here is Lily Moore at 10, as judged by her fifth grade teacher: 'Unsatisfactory...Hair matted, uncombed, disheveled appearance. Soil under nails.' She has in addition been AWOL from school for 37 full and 38 half days...She lives in a bizarre apartment whose living room furnishings consist of a gold lame castro convertible and two pink bath mats—her choice. She shares the habitation with a senile old woman and two bachelors, one of whom habitually cooks popcorn for breakfast wearing a pith helmet...All indications to the contrary notwithstanding. Lily is living a blessed life, as depicted in Laura Cunningham's unromantic, spare, funny, enchanting memoir." —The Washington Post

"A wonderfully vivid chronicle of a young girl's coming of age...funny and sad, irreverent and generous...A model memoir." —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Sharp-witted and funny but never mean. A lovely novelistic memoir." —Julie Salamon, The Wall Street Journal

"Original, quirky, poignant, and hilarious." —Los Angeles Times

"A winner...life-affirming." —San Francisco Chronicle

A moving, funny memoir of a wildly unorthodox Bronx childhood in the 1950's--the story of a girl who starts out fatherless, is orphaned at 8, is raised by two extremely odd strangers who happen to be her uncles, and slowly accumulates for herself a strong and--no matter how eccentric--deeply loving family.

Publishers Weekly

Adopted by her two eccentric bachelor uncles after her mother's death, the author describes growing up in an unorthodox but happy Bronx household during the 1950s. ``In an effective memoir that delineates a real, if idiosyncratic, world, Cunningham captures a special slice of New York with humor and integrity,'' observed PW. (Jan.)

Laura Shaine Cunningham is a playwright and journalist whose fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Vogue, and Mirabella, among other publications. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for her writing and theatrical work, Cunningham divides her time between New York City and her "place in the country."