Sarah McCraw Crow

Tara Clancy is only 36, but she manages to make her 1980s childhood feel like a long-lost era. In The Clancys of Queens, she gives us a coming-of-age memoir defined by the distinctive neighborhoods she grew up in: Broad Channel, Queens, a “bread crumb of an island” where her Irish-cop dad lived; Bellerose, her grandparents’ Italian-American enclave; and tony Bridgehampton, Long Island, where Clancy spent half her weekends with her mom and Mark, her mom’s well-to-do boyfriend.

A frequent contributor to “The Moth Radio Hour,” Clancy expanded her Moth stories for this memoir. She offers colorful character studies of the people who filled her young life, like cursing Grandma Rosalie (“Fahngool” was Rosalie’s “go-to, catchall punctuation”) and the barflies at Gregory’s bar—English Billy, Joey O’Dirt—where young Clancy and her dad were regulars, and where she had her first Communion party, with her large Irish clan that includes 21 first cousins in attendance.

An always-in-motion tomboy, Clancy loved her scrappy St. Gregory’s softball team and her best friend Esther, but not school. Unable to sit still in elementary school, she’d wander out of class to chat up any grown-ups she could find. The memoir follows her through her more difficult teen years, where she went from drinking and smoking pot daily to finding herself obsessed with Shakespeare and scraping together the money for college.

The oddities of Clancy’s upbringing make for some hilarious passages, but each chapter also forms a love letter—to her parents, Grandma Rosalie, Mark, her friends and lovers. Although she sometimes skates over darker material, like her dad’s drunk driving, her own teenage partying and a close friend’s abandoning her baby while in the grip of drugs, that’s a small complaint. Clancy has written a breezy, funny memoir with a wonderful cast of characters and a terrific sense of place.

One’s 30s might seem a little early to write a memoir, but Sam Polk has done a lot of living in his 35 years. For the Love of Money opens with the moment in 2011 when Polk learned that his annual hedge-fund bonus would be $3.6 million—and he was furious that it wasn’t twice as much. He then backs up to describe the steps and missteps that brought him to that point. 

Polk and his twin brother, Ben, grew up in a tumultuous household in Los Angeles where there was never enough money and their narcissistic dad held sway, often abusively. Overweight and socially unskilled, both brothers were bullied until they took up wrestling, a pursuit that led Polk to Columbia University. But at Columbia, Polk descended into binge drinking, drug use and bulimia. After breaking into a dormmate’s room and stealing pot, he was asked to leave the university. 

Still, Polk was competitive and ambitious, and he managed to get hired as an analyst at Bank of America, where he traded bonds and credit default swaps (CDS), and then snagged a trader position at a premier hedge fund. He’d “made it”—still in his 20s, he had an enormous Manhattan loft and a beautiful girlfriend. But he slowly came to terms with ambition’s underside: his addiction to drugs, alcohol and porn, estrangement from Ben and crippling envy. With the help of a counselor and his first boss, now a mentor, Polk gained sobriety and repaired his relationships. 

Polk’s redemptive one-step-forward, one-step-back story, along with his insider’s view of Wall Street and the larger issues of income inequality, make for a memoir that’s not only revealing but also timely.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fans of Thad Carhart’s bestselling 2001 memoir, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, will be glad to know that his latest book, Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France, offers a similar mix of memoir, history and wonderful digressions about France.

Carhart spent several years of his 1950s childhood in the village of Fontainebleau, France, where his Air Force pilot dad served as a staff officer at NATO (then headquartered at Chateau de Fontainebleau). Finding Fontainebleau’s main narrative follows the family, five kids ages 2 to 12 and their beleaguered parents, as they settled into an immense old house next door to the chateau. Carhart recounts adjusting to to French Catholic school, both its strictures—including Saturday classes—and pleasures—1950s French schoolboys were as crazy for marbles and coonskin caps as American boys. The family’s daily life mixed French and American: They shopped for food at the traditional outdoor market and boulangeries as well as the American military commissary, and had wine delivered (35 cents a bottle); and they piled into their Chevy wagon, heading to Paris for Carhart’s dad’s fencing competitions, and on near-disastrous camping trips in the French countryside and in Spain and Italy.

The book’s other narrative gives us a lively history of Chateau de Fontainebleau, built in 1137 as a hunting lodge, then added on to by successive kings, queens, and two Napoleons. Carhart takes us into closed-off rooms, where architects, carpenters, and other craftsmen work at restoration. He sees the rambling chateau, with its idiosyncratic additions, as a more fitting symbol of France than the more well-known Versailles.

Throughout, Carhart turns his observant eye on small, sometimes odd-seeming details—the once-ubiquitous Turkish toilets in cafes, the uniquely French method of taking household inventory, French cars of the 1950s. These lovely digressions, along with Carhart’s own family’s story, illuminate French culture in an appealing way.