Wednesday
August 10 at
12:30 pm
Moderated
by
Annie Pleshette Murphy
Jean
Nathan
The
Secret Life of the Lonely Doll:
The Search for Dare Wright
Reading • Talk • Booksigning
In 1957, a children’s book called The Lonely Doll was published. With its pink-and-white-checked cover and photographs featuring a wide-eyed doll, it captured the imaginations of young girls and made the author, Dare Wright, a household name. Close to forty years after its publication, the book was out of print but not forgotten. When the cover image inexplicably came to journalist Jean Nathan one afternoon, she went in search of the book--and ultimately its author. Nathan found Dare Wright living out her last days in a decrepit public hospital in Queens, New York. Over the next five years, Nathan pieced together Dare Wright’s bizarre life of glamour and painful isolation to create this mesmerizing biography of a woman who struggled to escape the imprisonment of her childhood through her art.
"[Nathan's]
sympathetic, graceful style seems appropriate for this private, elusive
figure who kept such porous boundaries between her real and imaginary
worlds."
--Joy Press, The Village Voice
"Thoroughly
engrossing, and fans of The Lonely Doll series will want to read her
terrific—and terrifically disturbing—life story...Readers
of this dark and haunting biography will never be able to look at
The Lonely Doll books, or their author, in quite the same way again."
--Rebecca
Maksel, San Francisco Chronicle
"Sensational
though Nathan’s subject matter is...she never descends
into exploitation. Her deft handling of these horrors recalls David
and Albert Maysles’ 1976 documentary Grey Gardens."
--L
D Beghtol, Time Out (New York)
Jean
Nathan graduated from Williams College and the Columbia School
of Journalism. She was a staff writer for The New York Observer and
a senior editor at Connoisseur magazine. She has written for The
New York Times, The New Yorker, Travel & Leisure, Vogue, and other
publications. She lives in
New York City.
WORD FOR WORD is a Bryant Park lunchtime series presented in cooperation with Coliseum Books. Notable authors discuss their newest books at the Bryant Park Reading Room, alongside 42nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. Following the readings, the authors will sign books, for sale on site from Coliseum Books.
In case of rain, this event will be moved to the Coliseum Books Café.