ISBN: 9780385335140

Passionate, questing, rigorous, Wefali's spirit infuses her journey to self-discovery. Her voice is the voice you hear when your ear is pressed to the closed door of another's life. [A… More...

Passionate, questing, rigorous, Wefali's spirit infuses her journey to self-discovery. Her voice is the voice you hear when your ear is pressed to the closed door of another's life. [A] searing memoir . . . Wefali spares no one in this indelible account . . . and her singular voicehaunted, angry, passionaterecalls Shirley Jackson's. The New Yorker Amine Wefali moved to the attic of her Westchester home while her husband of thirty years slept downstairs. This estrangement is the subject of Wefali's singular memoir that parts the curtain on the intimate stage of contemporary marriage. In a work marked for its restraint as much as for its insight, Wefali enters John Cheever territory through a series of razor-sharp vignettes. With the instinct of a born writer she transforms ordinary events into brilliant set pieces about therelations between men and women, husband and wife. A family secret is revealed on the way to her children's riding lesson, a conversation with a neighbor becomes a parable on the loss of love. A witty, irreverent woman of Russian descent, Wefali was a bemused outsider in the rarefied environment in which she lived. Anchored by her four children she remained, even as she was complicit in the erosion of her marriage. Restless and torn, she channeled her energy into her home, her garden, her writing. Another man enters her life. Her marriage, finally, fails. Praise for Westchester Burning How hauntingthis spare story is written with such clear lines that no one will be able to avoid its power. Here is a truly gifted writer who bores in where others might look away. Anne Roiphe, author of 1185 Park Avenue Like any spectacular disaster, [ Westchester Burning is] nearly impossible to look away from. . . . Wefali show[s] us the death throes of [her] marriageand the human cost involvedin deeply, frankly intimate detail. Elle Family & Relationships Family & Relationships eBook, Random House Publishing Group<

ISBN: 9780385335140

Amine Wefali had four beautiful children and houses in Westchester, Nantucket, and Florida--but her marriage had become acrimonious. She had moved into the attic of her exclusive home in … More...

Amine Wefali had four beautiful children and houses in Westchester, Nantucket, and Florida--but her marriage had become acrimonious. She had moved into the attic of her exclusive home in Westchester, a suburb of New York, while Phillip, her prosperous husband, remained downstairs. Torn between ambivalent emotions about her marriage and the inability to articulate her own longing for freedom, Wefali channeled her frustration into a whirlwind of domestic activity. Emotionally estranged, financially dependent, she was landlocked. Parting the curtains on the intimate stage of contemporary marriage, Wefali delicately coaxes from beneath the surface of domestic life the poignancy, tragedy, loss, and humor that punctuate a long-term relationship. With lacerating wit and candor--about herself and the upperclass world around her--Wefali finds her way out of the attic and into the selfhood she always wanted. And along her journey, she has recorded a stunning personal odyssey both unique and universal. From the Hardcover edition. Family & Relationships Family & Relationships eBook, Random House Publishing Group<