Upper Bohemia: A Memoir

In this intimate memoir, art historian Herrera (Isamu Noguchi) writes of being the daughter of “upper bohemian” artist parents who believed in “the importance of pleasure and living life to the hilt.” Herrera vividly brings to life her childhood summers in the 1940s and ’50s spent with her sister swimming at the family property, Horseleech Pond, in Cape Cod and of her chaotic and often magical experiences living in Manhattan and on the outskirts of Mexico City. Herrera’s father had inherited land on Cape Cod, and on it built houses that would eventually host their bohemian friends, including British architect Serge Chermayeff, Hungarian Futurist designer Marcel Breuer, artists György and Juliet Kepes, structural engineer Paul Weidlinger, novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, writer Edmund Wilson, and Peggy Guggenheim. Herrera notes that her often itinerant childhood was confusing, but her mother remains at the center: Herrera tells of the end of her parents’ marriage when her mother began an affair with scientist George Senseney; and of being driven to Mexico at age 10 in the “Coche de Mama” (her mother’s Chrysler station wagon, with real wood paneling) to live with her mother’s new boyfriend, Edmundo Lasalle. Her mother died in 1995, and Herrera writes that she felt “something enormous, like sunshine, like the pull of gravity, went out of my life.” This is a sparkling portrait of a rarified and complex upbringing. (June)