South Mountain Road: A Daughter's Journey of Discovery

Hesper Anderson's poignant memoir opens with her mother's suicide in March 1953 and closes late the following year, when reading the contents of Mab Anderson's strongbox revealed to 20-year-old Hesper that her parents were never married. This disclosure makes some sense out of turbulent interactions between her mother and father (the noted playwright Maxwell Anderson) that had baffled Hesper for years before their bitter separation. The author intersperses her narration of the period following her mother's death with memories of her childhood home on South Mountain Road in Rockland County, New York, where the Andersons lived in close communion with a group of fellow artists including Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, and cartoonist Milt Caniff. Visitors included humorist Marion Hargrove, the object of Hesper's adoration from the time she was 7, and the book's most shocking moment comes when Hargrove sleeps with the still-grieving girl months after her mother's suicide, then callously informs her he's getting married. Hesper Anderson skillfully conveys the comfortable yet bohemian atmosphere on South Mountain Road and its impact on her. Vivid character sketches include the warm, down-to-earth Lenya and the author's loving but judgmental father, but the strongest portrait is of Hesper herself, groping toward maturity in difficult circumstances. --Wendy Smith