Them: A Memoir of Parents

Tatiana du Plessix, the wife of a French diplomat, was a beautiful, sophisticated "white Russian" who had been the muse of the famous Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Alexander Liberman, the ambitious son of a prominent Russian Jew, was a gifted magazine editor and aspiring artist. As part of the progressive artistic Russian émigré community living in Paris in the 1930s, the two were destined to meet. They began a passionate affair, and the year after Paris was occupied in World War II they fled to New York with Tatiana's young daughter, Francine.

There they determinedly rose to the top of high society, holding court to a Who's Who list of the midcentury's intellectuals and entertainers. Flamboyant and outrageous, bold and brilliant, they were irresistible to friends like Marlene Dietrich, Salvador Dalí, and the publishing tycoon Condé Nast. But to those who knew them well they were also highly neurotic, narcissistic, and glacially self-promoting, prone to cut out of their lives, with surgical precision, close friends who were no longer of use to them.

Tatiana became an icon of New York fashion, and the hats she designed for Saks Fifth Avenue were de rigueur for stylish women everywhere. Alexander Liberman, who devotedly raised Francine as his own child from the time she was nine, eventually came to preside over the entire Condé Nast empire. The glamorous life they shared was both creative and destructive and was marked by an exceptional bond forged out of their highly charged love and raging self-centeredness. Their obsessive adulation of success and elegance was elevated to a kind of worship, and the high drama that characterized their lives followed them to their deaths. Tatiana, increasingly consumed with nostalgia for a long-lost Russia, spent her last years addicted to painkillers. Shortly after her death, Alexander, then age eighty, shocked all who knew him by marrying her nurse.

Them: A Portrait of Parents is a beautifully written homage to the extraordinary lives of two fascinating, irrepressible people who were larger than life emblems of a bygone age. Written with honesty and grace by the person who knew them best, this generational saga is a survivor's story. Tatiana and Alexander survived the Russian Revolution, the fall of France, and New York's factory of fame. Their daughter, Francine, survived them.

Customer Reviews:

A Memoir to Remember

By Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader - May 13, 2005

Francine du Plessix Gray who, has written several fine novels as well as complex and satisfying biographies of the Marquis de Sade and Simone Weil, now tenderly explores the lives of her famously mercurial parents. "Them" is a success any way you look at it; the elegant writing and the loving way she examines the life she had with these completely self-absorbed people make this memoir worth reading.

Her parents were Tatiana Yakoleva, a renowned New York designer of hats, and Alex Liberman, who was one of the creators of modern fashion journalism at Vogue. The du Plessix in Francine's name comes from her birth father, a hero of the French Resistance who died early in World War II. Although he never adopted her, Alex Liberman was the father she knew and loved, the man she and her mother always saw as the one who rescued them from the horrors of war. Tatiana had already fled one revolution, leaving Russia to live in Paris as a teenager with her grandmother, aunt, and uncle. In... read more

We cannot choose our parents . . .

By Alex M. Bobotis "book lover" - May 12, 2005

"Them" is an engrossing read. Mrs. Gray portrays her parents in their full roundedness with no holds barred when it comes to revealing their faults as well as their virtues. In reading the memoir, I found myself saying "what fascinating people yet how obnoxious. . . how powerful an emotion love is to permit a daughter to see all her parents' faults and still treat them with respect." The book is also a portrait of a time and an industry (magazine publishing) and of people finely attuned to the needs of fashionable society. It's also about Change and how we all become outmoded when our work fails to meet changing fashions.

Exquisite Writing

By Eileen Pollock - October 23, 2005

I saw the author at Barnes & Noble earlier this year, and I admit I was skeptical about her book. Was this another self-involved memoir? Upon reading it, I was proven delightfully wrong! Her parents' story is so beautifully told, in sentences so artfully crafted as to create an esthetic experience of the highest level. You feel she has carefully adjusted every nuance, every word, and placed each sentence for maximum effect. In fact, I wonder if her gift for exquisite language is not akin to her mother's for the perfect placement of decoration on her hat designs. There is a similar obsession with the telling detail, a similar esthetic sensibility. I loved this story, it moved slowly but it was ultimately so satisfying. There are really several, four or five, stories -- the colorful Russian relatives, the family's escape from France and early years in New York, the author's upbringing as a neglected child of privilege, the later years of Tatiana's decline and Alex's marriage to a... read more