The Astor Orphan: A Memoir

by Alexandra Aldrich

Overview

The Astor Orphan is an unflinching debut memoir by a direct descendant of John Jacob Astor, Alexandra Aldrich.

She brilliantly tells the story of her eccentric, fractured family; her 1980s childhood of bohemian neglect in the squalid attic of Rokeby, the family’s Hudson Valley Mansion; and her brave escape from the clan. Aldrich reaches back to the Gilded Age when the Astor legacy began to come undone, leaving the Aldrich branch of the family penniless and squabbling over what was left.

Illustrated with black-and-white photographs that bring this faded world into focus, The Astor Orphan is written with the grit of The Glass Castle and set amid the aristocratic decay of Grey Gardens.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062207951
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	04/08/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	205,779
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

Alexandra Aldrich lived at Rokeby, the house at the heart of this story, until she left to attend boarding school at the age of fourteen. She later moved to Poland, where she studied violin and history, and then back to the United States, where she taught high school English and converted to Orthodox Judaism.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Prologue 1

Part 1 Rokeby Dreams

1 The Legacy 7

2 Guards of Order 11

3 The Mentor 19

4 Venison Stew 31

5 The Conference 41

6 A Meticulous Record 47

Part 2 Elements of Disorder

7 Sunday Mornings 59

8 The Outlaw 71

9 Past Perfect 81

Part 3 Artists and Drifters

10 The Irregulars 95

11 A Seed is Planted 109

Part 4 All in a Summer's Plunder

12 A Parallel Universe 119

13 An Imported Order 127

14 Repossessed 135

15 Indisputable 139

16 Animal Wars 147

17 A Manly Endeavor 157

18 Like Proper Aristocrats 167

Part 5 Other Exiles

19 Home and Away 179

20 Migrations 191

21 Practically Orphans 197

22 Into the Mouth of Hell 205

23 A Dream Fulfilled 215

Part 6 In Search of Self

24 Blending in 229

25 Interviewed 241

26 The Elusive Edge 247

Acknowledgments 259

What People are Saying About This

Elliott Holt

“Evocative. . . . Aldrich astutely portrays a colorful cast of aunts, uncles, cousins and hangers-on—clinging to the family legacy long after the money is gone. One can’t help but cheer as she breaks away from the others to make a name for herself.”

Jennifer Vanderbes

“A beautifully-rendered family saga—full of fires, affairs, aristocrats and illegitimate children. At the center is an endearing heroine, whose eccentric childhood on the Grey Gardens-style Rokeby estate would make Dickens gasp. . . . Splendid.”

Susannah Cahalan

“It’s the highest of compliments to say that a memoir reads like fiction, and Alexandra Aldrich accomplishes this in her phenomenal debut. With swift, haunting prose, she breathes new life into the Astor clan.”

Editorial Reviews

It’s the highest of compliments to say that a memoir reads like fiction, and Alexandra Aldrich accomplishes this in her phenomenal debut. With swift, haunting prose, she breathes new life into the Astor clan.

Susannah Cahalan

A beautifully-rendered family saga—full of fires, affairs, aristocrats and illegitimate children. At the center is an endearing heroine, whose eccentric childhood on the Grey Gardens-style Rokeby estate would make Dickens gasp. . . . Splendid.

Jennifer Vanderbes

Evocative. . . . Aldrich astutely portrays a colorful cast of aunts, uncles, cousins and hangers-on—clinging to the family legacy long after the money is gone. One can’t help but cheer as she breaks away from the others to make a name for herself.

Elliott Holt

In a sparklingly mischievous debut, Aldrich peers into the intimate collapse of a once great Hudson River house—the “funny farm” of her Astor/Livingston/Chanler relatives. Spiraling way down from a long line of enterprising early Americans, financiers, socialites, and artists with illustriously entangled names, author Aldrich, whose great-grandfather was the famous music critic Richard Aldrich, reconstructs her early years growing up at the ancestral homestead of Rokeby, a 43-room mansion with numerous outlying towers and barns located on 450 acres somewhere along the Hudson River between New York City and Albany (though she never says where exactly, it is in Barryown, N.Y.). The fierce guardians of the house’s aristocratic legacy, exemplified by great-grandmother Margaret Chanler, who banished relatives who had divorced or converted to Catholicism, had passed by the 1980s when Aldrich was growing up at Rokeby to a generation of impoverished, disorderly parasites, alcoholics, and madmen. Her own father, called Teddy, a Harvard-educated handyman, seemed to delight in his “deliberate defiance” of his familial responsibility and refused to make a living, preferring to ride around on the backhoe, while her Polish-born peasant artist mother, Ala, was frequently depressed and resistant to any involvement in her only daughter’s school or life. Thus the young girl longed for order and stability and even a square meal, which she found occasionally at her Grandma Claire’s quarters, when the old matriarch wasn’t “sucking on the bottle.” Aldrich’s narrative tidily and fondly bears witness to the inexorable unraveling of a storied genealogy. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Rokeby, the sprawling, dilapidated Hudson Valley home of Aldrich’s aristocratic forebears, the Astors, played as much of a role in her bohemian childhood as any of the eccentric adults who raised her there. Tensions between efforts at historic preservation and a desire for normalcy and comfort created warring factions among the numerous family members (and their partisans) residing at the 43 room estate on 450 acres. Aldrich’s portrait of a family with more history and house than money, vividly illustrates the concept of shabby chic. What is made even clearer is the extent to which Aldrich’s family draws its identity from Rokeby.
VERDICT Inevitably, comparisons to Albert and David Maysles documentary film Grey Gardens spring to mind. Aldrich provides a fascinating, if voyeuristic peek behind the rotting silk curtains in one of America’s aristocratic families’ home. Seriously? It made this reader want to hop in a car and poke around Rokeby herself.

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Library Journal

In this novelistic debut, a poor girl with a rich pedigree remembers coming-of-age in the decaying shell of her family's once-grand Hudson Valley home. By the time Aldrich's grandparents inherited the Rokeby estate, their branch of a dynasty that included the 19th-century trader John Jacob Astor had lost almost all its wealth except for the 450-acre lot on the Hudson that had been in the family since the 1680s. Three hundred years later, when this memoir opens, the 10-year-old Aldrich and her destitute parents shared the elegantly crumbling mansion with her better-off aunt and uncle and two younger cousins. Her alcoholic grandmother and a pampered Labrador retriever shared a less-opulent guesthouse of more recent vintage, and a motley assortment of transients and bohemians lived rent-free, courtesy of her father Teddy's generosity (or inability to say no), in various outbuildings scattered around the property. A bright and sensitive girl on the doorstep of puberty, Aldrich was just beginning to feel the sting of shame associated with being the child of the charming but feckless Teddy, who, though educated at the best schools, had no skills or desires to be anything but the lord of Rokeby, and his beautiful, sharp-tongued wife. Her shame only increased when Teddy welcomed a mysterious French woman named Giselle into the fold. Rokeby had once been a paradise for Aldrich. With its scandalous secrets, it was becoming more like a prison she longed to escape through the auspices of a hypothetical unknown wealthy aunt or through her own skill at the violin. It's a trick to tell a story this rich and complicated through the eyes of a child without losing the subtleties of character and nuances of history, but Aldrich pulls it off with aplomb. Vividly gothic family romance.

Kirkus Reviews