Life Stories #33: Alexandra Aldrich

photo: Marisa Benedetto

This episode of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, features Alexandra Aldrich, the author of The Astor Orphan, a look back at the summer she was ten and living with her extended family at Rokeby, an estate in New York’s Dutchess County that’s been in the Astor and Livingston families for the last 11 generations… although, as she vividly recounts, the later generations had very little left of the “Astor fortune” except this sprawling home. It was a weird summer, much of that precipitated by her father, an Ivy League graduate who had no inclination or, really, aptitude for a traditional career—but no longer had the means to be an aristocratic gentleman. Yet, even as he’s scrounging up dented TV dinners from the nearby processing plant to feed young Alexandra, he’s putting his mistress up in another part of the compound…

We talk about that, and about Aldrich’s decision to focus on a very brief portion of what appears to be a remarkable life, and the inspiration she drew from James McBride’s The Color of Water… among a few other topics.

Listen to Life Stories #33: Alexandra Aldrich (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released.

4 June 2013 | life stories |