Janet, My Mother, and Me: A Memoir of Growing Up with Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray
William Murray, a staff writer atThe New Yorkerfor more than 30 years and author of more than 20 books, had the good fortune to be raised by a couple who loved one another intensely and doted on him completely. That the couple was composed of two remarkable and remarkably independent women who happened to be lovers didn't faze Murray in the least, despite the prevailing social winds of the '40s and '50s. That those two women were Natalia Danesi Murray (his mother) and Janet Flanner,The New Yorker's celebrated author of the "Letter from Paris" column, added indescribable richness to his life and helped inspire him towards his own career as a writer.In this winning memoir, Murray narrates the life story of his mother (born in Rome, she would develop a diverse career that included freelance writer, radio broadcaster, actress, and publishing big wheel--a woman he describes as "an explosive force of nature"); his maternal grandmother, Mammina Ester (who lived with them and had herself been a journalistic and literary firebrand in Italy, and during WWI was the first Italian female war correspondent to ever visit a front); and Janet Flanner, who wrote under the pseudonym Genêt and was lauded in Mary McCarthy's elegy as a "first citizen and patron of the arts, with some mythic quality in her like a splendid sacred bird."Murray tells his life story as well, growing up in New York and Italy, his life imbued with the fine arts of two cultures and the three women who raised him and molded him. His memoir is at once a movingly personal story, a revelation into the persona of three historic women, and an insight into how lesbians navigated their professional worlds and a disapproving society while maintaining a family life and a passion for one another. It's also a pleasant, gentle read, a story told in a genial tone about an earlier time. The individuals Murray describes are luminous personalities, and the reader feels privileged to share in their glow through the pages of this touching memoir.--Stephanie Gold