I would be remiss not to mention another decision reached in Massachusetts this week, one that was not at all moronic: at the midwinter American Library Association conference in Boston, the biggest prize in children’s literature, the John Newberry Medal, was awarded to Rebecca Stead for her book When You Reach Me.
With a deep bench of books I no longer have time to read by authors like Roberto Bolaño and the like, I suppose I shouldn’t feel bad about not having read this book yet. But Motoko Rich’s profile of the author and her work makes me want to rearrange the shelving a bit. Because Stead isn’t just a writer who lives in New York. She writes New York, and she’s actually from New York. Her story takes place in 1979 in my adopted neighborhood, the Upper West Side. The characters are those from her childhood, the school in the book much like her own P.S. 75 on 96th and West End Avenue.
In Manhattan these days, you’re about as likely to find a Leprechaun as a native New Yorker, but I am a complete sucker for stories of growing up in this neighborhood back in the day.
My mother and uncle lived here for a while when they were very young, because my grandfather was preaching at The Riverside Church (a godly posting that led, memorably, to a more recent evening a few years ago, with my uncle careening in his car down Houston Street, flipping off the cabbies and yelling out the window, “Fuck You! I was born in Manhattan!” I do miss the guy.)
I know I shouldn’t romanticize the way this neighborhood used to be. I know that twenty years ago those multimillion-dollar brownstones were as abandoned and forlorn as anything you’d find in the grotted heart of Baltimore. I know that King Curtis was stabbed in the heart on his stoop, just a few doors down from where I catch the subway.
It’s also true that more recent flood of stockbrokers into the Upper West Side didn’t just wash the blood off the sidewalks; it also washed away all the artists, punks, pushers and poets. But still I look at women like Rebecca Stead–authors, mothers, New Yorkers–and I think we’re making the right decision to stay. I think there’s a lot of good that can come for my daughter, right here in our neighborhood.
As my uncle would say: Fuck you. She was born in Manhattan.
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