Janet, My Mother, and Me: A Memoir of Growing Up with Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray

When I look back on the many books I've read over the past year (easily 50 or more), I can say emphatically that this was one of the best and most memorable. I can remember where I sat (by a fountain) when I began the book, and where I was (at a garden) when I closed its cover for the final time. Murray captured the essence of a very complex, yet loving relationship between two sophisticated, intelligent women. After I finished his book, I yearned to learn more about them, and read a biography of Flanner, Murray's mother's book of correspondence between herself and Flanner, and several of Flanner's New Yorker compilations. A heartfelt thanks, William Murray.

As a New Englander of mixed Italian and English ancestry, I feel I can relate easily to William Murray's experience, even though the Italian ladies in my background were houswives and factory workers, and not the brilliant and accomplished sort of person his mother was. Natalia's relationship with Janet Flanner is interesting and shows her (Natalia's) deep sense of humanity and commitment as well as her strong nurturing capacities. Italian mothers always think they are right, and my own opinion is that they always are right. Murray emphasizes Flanner's virtues and other good points, but I wonder about why she was so incapable of sacrificing a little of her time, her career, her work for the woman who loved her and whom she said she loved.By the time I finished reading this book, which is a very lovely memoir, I had really taken a strong liking to Natalia with her patience, tenderness, humanity, character, and love.

It's probably not fair as in not being 'entirely impartial' of me to submit a review of this book, about my grandmother and written by my father but this is the internet so maybe all those rules can be broken. I think that this is the best book that my father has ever written. He has truly 'opened a vein' and allowed such deep emotion to flow in language that is beautifully written. I am sure that Janet and my grandmother would have been proud of him and very impressed with the accomplishment. I personally know what it cost him to create this work, the hours (writing still in longhand, mind you) to recreate the lives of those two amazing women. This book is truly a testament to the power of the love he has for them and the depth of emotion so expressed in the quality of the writing. My grandmother was an incredibly complex person. She was stern and critical yet also deeply loving, kind and generous. As a child sometimes she scared me but I always looked forward with excitment to her visits, she was never boring. Janet I remember as a wonderful, funny and warm, always correcting your grammer. At the end of my grandmother's life when she came to California, knowing that her life was nearly over, she tried one last time to 'protect' my father. This time it was his wife, Alice, scarcely mentioned in the book, that my grandmother attempted to save him from. The reader wonders (as noted in the NYTimes book review) between the lines what went on in that time period and that was basically it. My father was completely torn emotionally in that situation and was forced to choose. This book is a tribute to the way he really feels about his mother and about Janet. He misses them more than life itself and this is his special offering to their memory.

As warm as the Italy he loves,William Murray has written an incredibly beautiful tribute to his mother, Natalia Danesi Murray and her long-time companion, Janet Flanner. He explores their deep relationship with great care, keeping the focus on them as he adds his own experiences growing up and growing older with them. What a triumvirate this must have been! Murray succeeds where many authors fail in noble attempts at "family" biography....he keeps just the right perspective in telling their story as well as his own. He relates the anguish of both women who experienced long separations from each other over their 38-year relationship but tempers it with the joy that Natalia and Janet felt during their many months, then finally years, together. I am impressed that Murray doesn't get carried away with general philosophizing about Lesbian working women, especially at a time when homosexuality was at its nadir...he rather simply, elegantly, and with several dashes of humor, becomes the camera lens through which we are able to view their personal and professional sides, especially through Janet's many letters to Natalia. In the end, I feel as if I have known all three for a long time.

Murray's father was a powerful agent in the golden era of the great Hollywood studios, his mother, Natalia, was a powerful and popular agent in the literary/celebrity circles of Europe and America, and his other "father" was Natalia's lover, the enormously admired and influential columnist of The New Yorker magazine, again in its most brilliant period, who filed insider news from Europe under the pseudonym "Genet", but who was in reality Janet Flanner, American lesbian, Parisresident, and a sharp observer of her own eccentric circle, and of Europe in it most turbu- lent decades.By a happy miracle this extraordinary scene, at once intimate, comic, despairing, and even inspiring finds a brilliant Boswell in Natalia's son. On his own Murray became a writer notable for his fiction and espe- cially for his New Yorker letters from Rome, whichcontinued that magazine's tradition of superb contemporary journalism. How he did this, and the world he came to know so well, make one of the most orginal and fascinating memoirs of our times. We are all lucky that his unique adventures as a child of three unusual (to say the least) "parents" has such a happy ending.