THOUGHTS FROM THE INTERIOR: INTROS/TEASERS – “CAMBRIDGE”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by Should Be Reading.

Today I’m spotlighting one of my Vine review books:  Cambridge, by Susanna Kaysen.

I am coming in late today, but I couldn’t resist posting anyway.

Intro:  It was probably because I was so often taken away from Cambridge when I was young that I loved it as much as I did.  I fell in love with the city, the way you fall in love with a person, and suffered during the many separations I endured.

In the summer before our October departure for England, the screen door to the backyard broke and had to be replaced.  The new door had a hydraulic canister that hissed when it opened or closed instead of smacking, thump, thump, the way the old door had.  I didn’t like this.  Neither did my cat, Pinch.  Cats and children are conservative.  Pinch would use the new door to go out of the house, but she refused to come in through it, and she’d sit by the front door waiting for someone to notice that she’d decided it was time to come home.  After three weeks in England, I felt the same way:  Okay, let’s go home now.  It’s time to go home.  But my parents, looking out their new, hydraulic door in England, didn’t notice me, and, like Pinch, I had to sit there hoping and hoping.

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Teaser: (In Greece)  My mother was as chic as her cigarettes.  This had happened in Italy, too.  She was a chameleon.  She took on the prevailing look.  (p. 184).

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Blurb:  “It was probably because I was so often taken away from Cambridge when I was young that I loved it as much as I did . . .”

So begins this novel-from-life by the best-selling author of Girl, Interrupted, an exploration of memory and nostalgia set in the 1950s among the academics and artists of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

London, Florence, Athens: Susanna, the precocious narrator of Cambridge, would rather be home than in any of these places. Uprooted from the streets around Harvard Square, she feels lost and excluded in all the locations to which her father’s career takes the family. She comes home with relief—but soon enough wonders if outsiderness may be her permanent condition.

Written with a sharp eye for the pretensions—and charms—of the intellectual classes, Cambridge captures the mores of an era now past, the ordinary lives of extraordinary people in a singular part of America, and the delights, fears, and longings of childhood.

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What do you think?  Nostalgic?  Do these excerpts bring back memories for you?