Borrowed Finery (Hardcover: 210 pages)

Book Magazine

Best known for her award-winning children's books, seventy-eight-year-old Fox isbeginning to receive overdue attention for her novels for adults. Fox is awfully good, and her new memoir is a rare gem. Shortly after her birth in 1923, Fox was left in a Manhattan foundling home by her parents, who come off as a poorer, less-successful version of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gregarious and handsome, Fox's father was a heavy-drinking screenwriter,responsible for The Last Train to Madrid, which Graham Greene called "the worst movie I ever saw." Her mother, a cruel and jealous woman, was so horrible that Fox wonders, was she "enough of an organic being to have carried me in her belly?" Fortunately, Fox was taken in by a congregational minister, a generous soul who treated her kindly and read to her every night. Eventually her parents resurfaced, taking her to one of many new locations, thenleaving her with good-hearted relatives, friends or strangers. What is amazing about Fox's splendidly... written memoir is that the author never sinks to self-pity; instead, she simplydescribes her unusual,provisional early life and allows the reader to generate his own emotional response.—James Schiff Read more Less