memoirs

2015 has been a strange year for rock documentaries, biographies, and memoirs. The perennial  obsession with artists who died young spawned feature-length examinations of the lives of Elliott Smith, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, and Jimi Hendrix. This year also saw Chrissie Hynde, Kim Gordon, Patti Smith, and Kristin Hersh all publishing acclaimed music-themed memoirs. Add to this list Sleater-Kinney co-founder and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, an account of her life growing up in the Pacific Northwest through the first several years of the rise of one of the

Seen through the lens of an anthropologist, the women who inhabit the Upper East Side of New York City appear to be a strange tribe with outrageous rituals, beliefs, and attitudes.

In this memoir by Wednesday Martin, we watch as she, along with her husband and young child, journey from lower to upper Manhattan – a trip that is negligible geography-wise and enormous socially and culturally.

As she undertakes the highly stressful search for the right apartment and preschool, Martin realizes what a foreign land she has moved to. It is from within this unique and exclusive enclave that Martin,