About this item
How can a mother and daughter who love (but don't always like) each other coexist without driving each other crazy? It's the universal question that has defined mothers and daughters from Demeter and Persephone to Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. "Wise, evocative, and rich in insight, this compassionate and beautiful memoir is ultimately an act of love." - Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl After surviving a traumatic childhood in nineteen-seventies New York and young adulthood living in the shadow of her flamboyant mother, Rita, a makeup-addicted former television singer, Elissa Altman has managed to build a very different life, settling in Connecticut with her wife of nearly twenty years. After much time, therapy, and wine, Elissa is at last in a healthy place, still orbiting around her mother but keeping far enough away to preserve the stable, independent world she has built as a writer and editor.
About the Author
"This earthy, gorgeously-written, sensual, powerful book is so compulsively-readable you'll want to read it in one great gulp, but you'll also want to slow down and savor every delicious morsel. Elissa Altman has written a brave and generous memoir, a lucid love letter to her history that--in its bracing clarity and large-heartedness--does the work of great memoir in piercing the reader's separateness, and reminding us that we are not alone. I love this book." --Dani Shapiro, national bestselling author of Devotion"Treyf is a memoir that reads like a novel, a spellbinding portrait of a very specific world that also serves as a universal primer on identity, on loneliness, on the nature of familial bonds, on the ways we make sense of the mess of our lives. Gorgeous, singular, heartbreaking, haunting." --Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year"Treyf is a beautiful, brilliant memoir filled with striking images, unforgettable people, and vivid stories. Elissa Altman has given us the story of an era and a tribe, rooted in 1970s New York City, wrought with such visceral love that the pages shimmer." --Kate Christensen, bestselling author of Blue Plate Special"With TREYF, Elissa Altman has outdone herself. Intricately structured, exquisitely wrought, TREYF exposes the love and longing at the core of transgression. It is a tour de force - nimble, cinematic, restrained. The sacred and the profane are no binary in Altman's world; they are two chambers of a single, beating heart."--Jessica Fechtor, author of Stir"Savvy, warm hearted, and profoundly illuminating...The meaning of the forbidden--in a family, in a self--and the human needs we all struggle with are gloriously explored. This is a transforming book, one of the most satisfying memoirs I've ever read."--Bonnie Friedman, author of Surrendering Oz: A Life in EssaysElissa Altman is the critically-acclaimed, award-winning author of Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, the James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name, the Washington Post column Feeding My Mother, and a finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize. She is a contributor to publications ranging from Tin House and Dame Magazine to O: The Oprah Magazine, Saveur, and the New York Times and has spoken live at TEDx on the moral imperative to care for senior citizens.A 2016 resident fellow at Vermont Studio Center, Altman writes full time from her home in Newtown, Connecticut where she lives with her spouse of sixteen years, book designer Susan Turner.
