After the publication of Lagnado’s stunning, prize-winning memoir about her father, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, she received a lot of comments from readers who thought her mother received short shrift. “I realized that I had an unbelievably profound longing to write her story. When I wrote my father’s story, I could be completely removed while I was writing about his alleged affairs, and his leaving my mother behind at home and going off at all hours of the night. I think at some level I had to write my father’s story [first]. With my mother, it was so much more painful, so much more raw, even though almost the same number of years had passed since her death.”
Her latest memoir, The Arrogant Years (Ecco, Sept.), is as much her own story as it is her mother’s. The title was inspired by a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Lagnado tells Show Daily, “The character, Nicole, is institutionalized as a young girl; Fitzgerald had this marvelous line: ‘She had lost two of the great arrogant years in the life of a pretty girl—now she felt like making up for them.’”
Lagnado was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease when she was 16 and those words resonated with her own experience. She explains, “I read it in college and I never forgot it. It was all about this loss of arrogance; that’s how I wanted to approach what had happened to me. I remember when I first read it and when I read it now, feeling a very personal connection. That’s one of the crucial themes—a kind of loss of arrogance in myself and in my mom.”
Her mother, Edith, though only 20 when she got married, already had a successful career as a private school teacher and librarian in Cairo, Egypt. A pasha’s wife also took a liking to her and she became the woman’s protégé. When she married Lagnado’s father, her life changed. “It was what you did in that time,” Lagnado says. “She had to leave it all for the marriage—and she never got over it. She became a wife and a mother very quickly: she was trapped. She had five children, one of whom died, and she loved us, but she always hearkened back to that time, so that became a consuming mystery of my own life and of this book.”
Her first time at BEA, Lagnado is excited about today’s ABA’s Celebration of Bookselling Author Awards Luncheon. She is especially looking forward to seeing Mitch Kaplan from Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla. “Mitch gave me my first break. He had me come to his store before Sharkskin was reviewed by the New York Times. All of the indies have been very embracing of my first book, so I think it will be wonderful to reconnect with them.”
In addition to attending the luncheon, the author will be signing ARCs of her book, tomorrow at Table 6 in the autographing area, 3:30–4 p.m.
