{"id":2841,"date":"2013-06-04T19:00:55","date_gmt":"2013-06-04T23:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=2841"},"modified":"2014-01-26T19:42:33","modified_gmt":"2014-01-26T23:42:33","slug":"life-stories-33-alexandra-aldrich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2013\/06\/04\/life-stories-33-alexandra-aldrich\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Stories #33: Alexandra Aldrich"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Life<\/a>
\nphoto: Marisa Benedetto<\/font><\/p>\n

This episode of Life Stories<\/i>, 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<\/i><\/a>, a look back at the summer she was ten and living with her extended family at Rokeby<\/a>, 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<\/i> 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…<\/p>\n

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<\/i>… among a few other topics.<\/p>\n

Listen to Life Stories<\/i> #33: Alexandra Aldrich<\/a> (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also subscribe to Life Stories<\/i> in iTunes<\/a>, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alexandra Aldrich is a direct descendant of the Astor dynasty, but the family fortune had long since evaporated by the time she was born. She grew up with her parents living in the run-down servant quarters of a sprawling mansion, away from the parts that were kept open for tour groups. In The Astor Orphan, she writes about one particular summer when, as the daughter of the black sheep of the family, her circumstances became particularly frustrating, and her desire to break away from her family and its past reached a tipping point…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[272],"tags":[584,132,305,585,586],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2841"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2841"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3289,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2841\/revisions\/3289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}