“[Lagnado writes] in crystalline yet melodious prose.”
—New York Times
Lucette Lagnado’s acclaimed, award-winning The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (“[a] crushing, brilliant book” —New York Times Book Review) told the powerfully moving story of her Jewish family’s exile from Egypt. In her extraordinary follow-up memoir, The Arrogant Years, Lagnado revisits her first years in America, and describes a difficult coming-of-age tragically interrupted by a bout with cancer at age 16. At once a poignant mother and daughter story and a magnificent snapshot of the turbulent ’60s and ’70s, The Arrogant Years is a stunning work of memory and resilience that ranges from Cairo to Brooklyn and beyond—the unforgettable true story of a remarkable young woman’s determination to push past the boundaries of her life and make her way in the wider world.
“[Lagnado writes] in crystalline yet melodious prose.”
—New York Times
Lucette Lagnado’s acclaimed, award-winning The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (“[a] crushing, brilliant book” —New York Times Book Review) told the powerfully moving story of her Jewish family’s exile from Egypt. In her extraordinary follow-up memoir, The Arrogant Years, Lagnado revisits her first years in America, and describes a difficult coming-of-age tragically interrupted by a bout with cancer at age 16. At once a poignant mother and daughter story and a magnificent snapshot of the turbulent ’60s and ’70s, The Arrogant Years is a stunning work of memory and resilience that ranges from Cairo to Brooklyn and beyond—the unforgettable true story of a remarkable young woman’s determination to push past the boundaries of her life and make her way in the wider world.
Reviews-
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June 6, 2011
Lagnado's tenacious, long-suffering Cairene mother, Edith, is the focus of this lyrical if long-winded second family memoir, after The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. Raised mainly by her own mother in the close-knit yet diverse Jewish neighborhood of Sakakini in Cairo when her father deserted them in the late 1920s, Edith was educated rigorously in a French-speaking school patronized by the pasha Cattaui and his wife, infused by a passion for literature early on, then became a well-respected teacherâa rare achievement for girls in Egypt at the time. Edith's beauty attracted a wealthy older man about town, Leon, prompting illusions of aristocracy and romance in both Edith and her mother, which were sadly not realized. Indeed, the "evil eye" seemed to have dogged the family from Cairo to New York, where they were forced to migrate after the Egyptian revolution in 1952; displaced to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, by 1964, the family disintegrated amid straitened circumstances. The youngest, the author, nicknamed Loulou, exercised her incipient sense of injustice by testing the sexist boundaries of her neighborhood synagogue, the Shield of Young David. She modeled herself on the daring, beautiful Emma Peel in The Avengers and managed to attend Vassar and Columbia, and became an investigative journalist. Her memoir is a fully fleshed, moving re-creation of once-vibrant Jewish communities. -
New York Times Book Review
"[E]nchanting...It's risky to write a second memoir about the same time period, but in Lagnado's hands, the result feels natural and right. She skillfully reminds us that a single human life is infinitely complex, that there are as many sides to a story as times it is told." — New York Times Book Review
"The Arrogant Years [is] a paragon of memoir writing, a story about the complex swirl of people and events and forces out of which individual lives are made — some, like Ms. Lagnado's, more painfully, but also more fully, than others." — New York Times
"[A] taut and moving memoir...With a journalist's economy of style and an intuitive sense of story, [Lagnado] weaves an account of her own arrogant years.... [A] meditation on exile and assimilation, feminism and the enduring ties of family." — San Francisco Chronicle
"With precision and searing honesty, Lucette Lagnado writes in The Arrogant Years about her torn allegiances as both an Egyptian Jew growing up in America in the 1960s and '70s and the youngest daughter of unhappily married parents." — O, The Oprah Magazine
"Lagnado is at her best when she plumbs her own psyche to sort out her life's ups and downs...a rewarding journey." — Washington Post
"[A]ffecting...Lagnado writes with great affection and compassion for her mother, and she describes displacement and the urgency of memory. Readers... of Sharkskin will again be moved.... It is also a portrait of awe-inspiring caregiving by a loving daughter." — Jewish Week
"[Lagnado makes] the vital point that there can be many perspectives on the same story....affecting...[an] affectionate, engaging memoir." — Boston Globe
"From Pashas to paupers, from the alleyways of Cairo to the working class streets of Brooklyn, this epic family saga of faith and fragility showcases Lucette – nicknamed Loulou by her family—as a budding contrarian in her alien New World." — Jewish Woman Magazine, Book of the Month
"This moving follow-up [to The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit] revolves around Lagnado and her mother, both of them battling their fates and coming of age in times of social change." — New York Times Book Review, Paperback Row
"Weaves together the life stories of several women in a way that will resonate with readers of any ethnicity...Lagnado's done a fabulous job, again, of transporting us to a multi-ethnic Cairo that no longer exists. That alone is worth the price of admission." — Library Journal
"You don't have to be Jewish to take this entrancing literary ride.... The Arrogant Years is a lovely book, sad and hilarious by turn, written with love of life, and an enormous affection for language. You will love it too." — Malachy McCourt, New York Times bestselling author of A Monk Swimming
"In the radiant presence of Lucette Lagnado herself—and in The Arrogant Years, her moving and unsparingly revelatory second memoir... we have honesty as purity of style, and lucidity as burning emotion, and history as an enduring hymn to resilience." — Cynthia Ozick
"Lyrical...[Lagnado's] memoir is a fully fleshed, moving re-creation of once-vibrant Jewish communities." — Publishers Weekly
"[A] frank and searching chronicle of lost and found dreams... Lagnado is spellbinding and profoundly elucidating in this vividly detailed and far-reaching family memoir of epic adversity and hard-won selfhood."...
