South Mountain Road: A Daughter's Journey of Discovery

My mother killed herself on the first day of spring. So begins South Mountain Road Hesper Andersons elegant wrenching memoir of death and deception family secrets and memories and of a young girls trauma of self-discovery. When Hesper Anderson the daughter of famed Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Maxwell Anderson (What Price Glory? Winterset Key Largo The Bad Seed) got the phone call informing her that her mother the beautiful enigmatic Mab had committed suicide she knew that her world would be forever changed. A woman of baffling remoteness and alienating beauty Mab Anderson had been the dominant figure in her daughters life. What Hesper did not realize however was that beyond the inevitable devastation of loss lay a whole chain of discoveries that would link her irrevocably both to her mothers past and to secrets that would turn her world upside down. Hesper was a shy young girl insecure and -- to her mind -- inadequate. As a result she spent much of her childhood adrift rendered all but invisible by the alienating shadow of her mother surrounded (but not impressed) by the brilliance and celebrity of her parents friends and neighbors -- people such as the composer Alan Jay Lerner cartoonists Bill Mauldin and Milton Caniff playwright/composer Kurt Weill and Weills wife actress Lotte Lenya (who was also Mabs best friend) -- all of whom lived on or near South Mountain Road in a rural community outside New York City. It was to be expected then that when a handsome young author himself an outsider brought into the charmed world of South Mountain Road by Maxwell Anderson showed Hesper special attention she developed a schoolgirl crush on him. It was an attachment that endured for years and continued to haunt the impressionable young girl to the brink of womanhood and beyond leading perhaps inevitably to an emotional crisis almost as devastating as her mothers death. Hesper was away from South Mountain Road off at college when she got the call that her mother was dead. When that call came Hesper began what was in effect a journey of discovery -- an immersion in the past that revealed unexpected facts about herself about the world she had grown up in and most especially about the two people who were her parents. What she discovered in the end was a series of shocking secrets some terrible truths and her own broken heart. South Mountain Road is a startlingly personal and beautifully conceived and written story of a young girls coming of age through the suicide of her mother. Featuring a virtual Whos who of literary celebrities of its time (the late 1930s and 1940s) and place (New York and its environs) it is a remarkably novelistic and delicately wrought memoir of immediacy and grace.