Order Alert: PRIMATES
OF PARK AVENUE
Making the wives of the 1% nervous, a tell-all memoir set in the lavish world of the NYC elite, Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin (Simon & Schuster), is racing up the Amazon rankings ahead of next week’s publication date.
Martin, a social researcher who moved with her financier husband and toddler son to the Upper East Side, turns her trained eye (she has a PhD from Yale) on the women who lunch – at charity benefits that can cost $10,000 a table.
She found herself bemused at the culture until she framed the quest for the newest “it” bag and the preschool hierarchy through the lens of anthropology, both befriending and observing the women of her new circle and collecting their stories.
The women who told their tales, as the NY Post’s “Page Six” reports, are now feeling exposed, “a guessing game has emerged about which glossy, manicured moms are included as stories in the book.”
Martin wrote an essay for the NYT which has drawn plenty of attention and commentary. Some of the attention-getting tidbits include upper-crust husbands granting wives year end bonuses, parents paying obscene amounts of money for their babies to have food coaches and sending toddlers to tutoring sessions to learn to interact well in play dates.
The guessing game of who does what, along with the gossipy and avid reading, is a scene straight out of the The Help.
The predictable controversy and mommy-shaming is more like the 2011 backlash against Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
It all adds up to a juicy summer read and a fair bit of schadenfreude.
Check your orders. Many libraries have yet to order it and those that have show growing holds.