Читать книгу Blue Money - Janet Capron - Страница 6

Author’s Note

I grew up on Park Avenue with my mother and a series of live-in maids. My grandfather, a retired liberal newspaper publisher and quixotic champion of the workingman, supported us in style. I mention my grandfather not only to show the source of my mother’s and my good fortune but also to help the reader understand my fall from grace. I translated his lifelong fight for the underdog to mean I should become the underdog. I went to a good private school and to camp in the summer, and spent Easter vacations at my grandparents’ winter home in Palm Beach. But I was destined to join, for more than a decade, the ranks of the marginal and despised.

By the time I got to a progressive women’s college in the mid-sixties, I was drunk almost every day and barely functioning. The dean of students seemed genuinely sorry when she had to ask me to leave. I started to rebel more pointedly after that, experimenting with drugs in addition to booze and exploring radical feminism, all of which took me to the threshold of the time of this book—the summer of 1971.

Blue Money is a memoir written in the guise of fiction. Everyone’s name has been changed except my own. While the book is drawn directly from my life on the streets of New York City in the seventies, a few characters are composites and timelines may not be entirely accurate.

In spite of these novelistic details, all of Blue Money, at its heart, is true.