Books like The Tiffany Girls

I originally read Thayer Hamann when I was in high school and identified so deeply with Evie, the protagonist, and also saw in her the person I yearned to become. Evie shares the intricacies of the teenage girl experience, beginning with her high school career in East Hampton and spanning through her undergraduate years at NYU.

Her perspective is graceful, smart, and deeply feeling, with her heart fully exposed on her sleeve—much in the way mine was as a teenager (and still is, in many ways). There’s an epic love story at the heart of the novel, as well (even though I wrote a thriller, I am a romantic to my core), and I’m not too proud to say that the love interest, Roarke, continues to be one of my favorite “book boyfriends.” I reread this every couple of years and can confirm it stands the test of time.  

Louis Comfort Tiffany was famous in the late nineteenth century for magnificent stained-glass designs. In 2006, a collection of letters was found from one of Tiffany’s employees, Clara Wolcott, describing her experiences as head of the Tiffany Studios Women's Glass Cutting Department.

These letters gave insight into Clara’s life and her relationships and also revealed how many of Tiffany’s designs were actually created by her. Echo Heron took those letters and wrapped them into a beautiful story about a talented artist who loved her art so much that she was willing to sacrifice fame and fortune and much of her personal life.

I not only appreciated the beautiful, detailed descriptions of the artwork but also her descriptions of the passion and effort that Clara put into them. I don’t like books about historical figures where the author gives them modern attitudes and dialog, but the hero of this book is… show more.

I was working as a nanny in New York City when I discovered this wild novel, and I consumed it in short order. Marie, fresh from prison, is hired out of pity to watch a high school friend’s daughter. “The situation would’ve been humiliating had Marie any ambition in life. Fortunately, Marie was not in any way ambitious.” Marie is instead selfish, culpable, hungry, and smitten—first with her friend’s life, then her friend’s husband, and most dangerously, her friend’s daughter. Dermansky’s novel could easily slip into thriller territory, and while it is as fast-paced and compulsively readable, instead we discover unpredictably that Bad Marie is really a love story.

I read Tropic of Cancer at the beginning of my writing career, soon after I’d begun living on my own for the first time. Miller’s life as a Brooklyn boy in Paris, struggling to survive and to write, seemed similar in so many ways to my own life in Manhattan. I’ve since read Tropic of Cancer multiple times and have portions memorized. I went through a phase where everything I wrote came out sounding like Henry Miller—that’s how taken I was by his voice. Miller taught me that it’s possible to write a great book that’s voice-driven rather than plot-driven.

This book is an unfinished work, hard to follow, because it is a draft never reviewed by the author and published posthumously.

However, it is a must-read, so please do not be discouraged as I was, for the ideas that it encloses picture a more equalized society practically based on the changing of our economic road, nothing else than ending capitalism as we know it.

Two subjects are of particular interest: first, how to correctly retribute people for the wealth they generate through their work; and second, a demonstration of how excess production and money amassing do not amount to wealth. An interesting lesson in economics.

This book revealed a pastoral Manhattan few of us could imagine, including feral pigs that roamed the streets, and horses that transported everything and everyone around town. Set in the transformative 1800s when New York City underwent unprecedented urbanization, this book shows how farmers and other New Yorkers who worked the land were ultimately squeezed from Manhattan for more profitable tenants, and how Central Park, and other open spaces, sought to replicate all that recently displaced nature.   

Molly Grant is a divorce attorney at a large Manhattan firm representing wealthy and demanding clients. While the book is entertaining in its descriptions of ridiculous office politics and insufferable clients, what made me fall in love with it was the main character. Molly is sharp and funny, and in the beginning of the book, she seems like the typical associate playing the game to get ahead, putting in the hours and stroking egos while also keeping her head down. But when the ex-wife of a rich, ruthless media mogul seeks help because her husband is alienating her children against her, Molly has to choose between her own career advancement or listening to her conscience to use her lawyer powers for good. This is an engrossing, entertaining, feel-good read. 

Another classic—albeit of a far different type—Lucy Sante uncovers the underbelly of 19th- and early 20th-century New York, a world filled with pimps, madams, gamblers, con men, and crooked cops. But this book is more than just a collection of stories about colorful characters. It’s also a meditation on the city’s secrets and the allure of danger and darkness. I dealt with some of the same themes in my own book and had no better model to emulate than this groundbreaking work.

I’m a sucker for a cool historical setting and also for romance with a social-status difference as a main obstacle, and this novel delivers on both! In 1920s-era New York City, amid Prohibition and jazz and snazzy fashions—and, in this version of things, an underworld of secret magic—wealthy Arthur meets working-class Rory, and the sparks begin. Both of the men are utterly endearing (another feature I’m soft on) and bring different paranormal powers to the problem of a lethal magical relic on its way to New York. There are two more books in the series, so if you fall for this pair, hurray! There’s more to read.

This is the primer for everything Downtown during arguably Downtown’s greatest era. The contributions are first-rate, by people who were on the scene, and it’s a handsome book to hold. If you’re interested in anything from Punk and Patti Smith to Haring, Basquiat, and Afrika Bambaataa, this is the place to start, without nostalgia, agenda, or hype.