Westchester Burning
Portrait of a Marriage
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Passionate, questing, rigorous, Wefali's spirit infuses her journey to self-discovery. Her voice is the voice you hear when your ear is pressed to the closed door of another's life.
“[A] searing memoir . . . Wefali spares no one in this indelible account . . . and her singular voice—haunted, angry, passionate—recalls Shirley Jackson's.”—The New Yorker
Amine Wefali moved to the attic of her Westchester home while her husband of thirty years slept downstairs. This estrangement is the subject of Wefali's singular memoir that parts the curtain on the intimate stage of contemporary marriage. In a work marked for its restraint as much as for its insight, Wefali enters John Cheever territory through a series of razor-sharp vignettes. With the instinct of a born writer she transforms ordinary events into brilliant set pieces about the relations between men and women, husband and wife. A family secret is revealed on the way to her children's riding lesson, a conversation with a neighbor becomes a parable on the loss of love.
A witty, irreverent woman of Russian descent, Wefali was a bemused outsider in the rarefied environment in which she lived. Anchored by her four children she remained, even as she was complicit in the erosion of her marriage. Restless and torn, she channeled her energy into her home, her garden, her writing. Another man enters her life. Her marriage, finally, fails.
Praise for Westchester Burning
“How haunting—this spare story is written with such clear lines that no one will be able to avoid its power. Here is a truly gifted writer who bores in where others might look away.”—Anne Roiphe, author of 1185 Park Avenue
“Like any spectacular disaster, [Westchester Burning is] nearly impossible to look away from. . . . Wefali show[s] us the death throes
of [her] marriage—and the human cost involved—in deeply, frankly intimate detail.”—Elle
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In hypnotically flat, simple sentences, Wefali tells the story of the rise and fall of her almost upper-class, Westchester, N.Y., marriage. Her husband is a work-obsessed executive, mostly notable by his absence from family life. In spite of his long hours at the office, the couple has four children, necessitating constant shuttlings to various schools, camps and training programs. House purchases (in Westchester, New Hampshire, Nantucket and Florida), travel between homes and the elaborate cleaning and furnishing of these abodes consume the first half of the marriage. In the marriage's middle years, houses are either mortgaged or sold (or rented to disastrous tenants, entailing more cleaning). As her husband progressively becomes an absentee landlord with his marriage as well as his real estate, Wefali starts an affair with a shady but romantic Russian, propelling the marriage to its fated rocks. The devolution property squabbles, child custody threats is as ugly as the marriage, only clearer. By the book's end, Wefali and her ex are at least nicer to each other, even if it feels more like a deal-with-the-devil than a true meeting of equals. Wefali's style is spare, which may surprise readers expecting Russian histrionics, and quite unsparing, as readers are dismissively told of the sexual abuse of the narrator and her children. It's a familiar theme: the ladies lunch, tell all... and then charge the meal to hubby's credit card.
