Shy

March 1, 2022

With Animal Joy, poet/psychoanalyst Alsadir, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for the collection Fourth Person Singular, gets serious about studying the importance of laughter (30,000-copy first printing). Long-listed for the National Book Award and a Granta Best of Young American Novelists, Ball was inspired by French writer/artist �douard Lev�'s memoir (written at age 39) to offer his own frank Autoportrait in his 39th year. In 1920s Paris, Kiki de Montparnasse was a model, muse, and friend to cultural greats and an artist, cabaret star, and driving force in her own right, as Braude (The Invisible Emperor) highlights in Kiki Man Ray. With Eliot After "The Waste Land," award-winning scholar/poet Crawford follows up his highly regarded Young Eliot (10,000-copy first printing). Standing as both memoir and memorial, Black Folk Could Fly is a first selection of personal nonfiction from the late author/mentor Kenan, whose award-winning works powerfully communicate his experience of being Black, gay, and Southern. Lowell's Memoirs collects the complete autobiographical prose of the great poet, including unpublished early work (10,000-copy first printing). What is home but A Place in the World, and Tuscany celebrant Mayes's new book explores what home really means in all its variations. As Morris explains in her first book of nonfiction, she came to the writing career launched with the multi-million-copy best-selling The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Listening Well (50,000-copy first printing). Composer of the Tony-nominated musical Once Upon a Mattress, author of the novel Freaky Friday and the follow-up screenplay, and chair of the Juilliard School, Rodgers has a lot more to discuss in Shy than being the daughter of Richard Rodgers (25,000-copy first printing). Addressed to Wohl's brother Bobby, who died in 1965, As It Turns Out reconstructs the life of their sister, the iconic actress/model Edie Sedgwick made famous by Andy Warhol (30,000-copy first printing).

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Starred review from May 23, 2022
In this rollicking posthumous memoir, composer and writer Rodgers (1931–2014) revisits the highs and lows of her life and career. Enriched with droll commentary from Green, chief theater critic for the New York Times, Rodgers’s narrative takes readers from her affluent yet stifling childhood—as the daughter of American composer Richard Rodgers and a mother whose “idea of a daughter,” Rodgers writes, “was a chambermaid crossed with a lapdog”—to her years of wild success in the ’50s and ’60s on Broadway and beyond. While her challenging relationship with her mother runs as a constant thread throughout, Rodgers looks back, more fondly, on her six pregnancies (“I loved being pregnant.... More than I loved writing music, if I’m honest”) and her accomplishments, including her first musical, Once Upon a Mattress (1959), starring Carol Burnett—“If you don’t know who Carol Burnett... is,” hectors Green, “you’re definitely not reading this book”—and her 1972 runaway hit novel, Freaky Friday. Of the decades-long success of Once Upon a Mattress, Rodgers cheekily proclaims, “Some people have a medley of their hits; I have a medley of one.” It’s this playful, self-deprecating humor that makes Rodgers’s stories sing, and fans are sure to delight in every witty detail. This has major star power.

Starred review from June 15, 2022
A legendary figure of American musical theater narrates her life and her career in startlingly frank terms. Rodgers moved in theater circles nearly her entire life (1931-2014). Her remembrances are lively, witty, honest, and "dishy" regarding a host of boldfaced names, both those she loved and those she hated. New York Times chief theater critic Green's annotations fill out the history and offer helpful fact-checks. Daughter of composer Richard Rodgers and mother of composer Adam Guettel, Mary, also a composer, surrounded herself with talent. As an adolescent girl, she played word games with lifelong friend Stephen Sondheim; as a teenager, she dated Hal Prince. She served as an assistant for 14 years for the New York Philharmonic's Young People's Concerts program, and always she found Leonard Bernstein "fascinating." Carol Burnett found her breakthrough role in Rodgers' Once Upon a Mattress, while Judy Holliday bombed in Hot Spot. Rodgers was also the author of classic children's books, including Freaky Friday, and became a leading "philanthropeuse" of New York society, including seven years as chairman of the board of the Julliard School. She takes us inside the "romance"-like nature of collaborating on a musical. The "erotic part of songwriting," she writes, is "the way you mate words with music." She also writes movingly and with "knee-jerk transparency" about parental neglect ("I doubt either of my parents really even wanted to have children"), adultery, rampant alcoholism, and other dark sides of her artistic circles. Her first marriage was a mistake, though "everyone should marry a gay man at least once." Rodgers also endured an abortion and the death of a child. Some of her anecdotes seem like more family lore than lived history--e.g., at Mary's birth, her mother told the nurse, "Take her away and bring her back when she looks younger"--but most of her stories are revelatory and often hilarious. "I broke a lot of rules," she admits, "but they weren't mine." A Broadway tell-all that deserves to become a classic of music theater lore.

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Starred review from July 1, 2022
"Why should anyone want to hear about the daddy (and mummy) issues of a second-drawer composer and children's book author?" Frankly, Mary Rodgers, the daughter of Broadway composer Richard Rodgers, has a point. Her only real musical success was the 1959 show, Once upon a Mattress. Freaky Friday, Rodgers' best-selling children's novel, which was spun off into movies and TV shows, came about serendipitously when legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom asked Maurice Sendak if Steven Sondheim would write a children's book; Sondheim said no but directed Nordstrom to Rodgers. These kinds of famous names are strewn throughout this memoir, and that's part of what makes it so fascinating, turning Rodgers into a privileged Broadway Zelig, who knew everyone (and their secrets) and isn't afraid to spill them. Rodgers' voice comes vividly alive here, even though she died in 2014. Apparently, it took coauthor and theater critic Green lots of time to cull years of his interviews with Rodgers and to annotate each page with copious, -often-amusing notes, and the result is a candid, hilarious, and fascinating look at a life lived with honesty and only the occasional regret. Whether Rodgers is recounting her lifelong love for childhood friend Sondheim or describing her perpetually fraught dance with her parents, this will have readers applauding loudly.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2022

Rodgers was working on this dishy memoir (with New York Times chief theater critic Green) when she died at age 83 in 2014. Rodgers, daughter of one half of Rodgers & Hammerstein, meant the memoir to be shocking and she doesn't mince words. She writes her father could "count his friends on no hands." Green's extensive footnotes provide background and context, and gently rein in Rodger's occasionally cloudy recollections or inaccuracies. Along with gossipy stories and acerbic zingers, Rodgers explores being a woman, a single mom and Jewish in a time when those traits signaled outsider and usually held a person back. She shares both successes (her musical Once Upon a Mattress; YA novel Freaky Friday; philanthropy, motherhood) and low points (friction in relationships, sour business deals, the death of a son). She admits her own mistakes and points out the shortcomings of others along the way. VERDICT Rodgers tells it the way she saw it, often stripping away the celebrity glamour of growing up in a revered musical theater environment. Green is a welcome and unobtrusive organizing voice and fact checker. Hollywood biography readers and musical theater fans will enjoy.--Maggie Knapp

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