South Mountain Road

A Daughter’s Journey of Discovery

by Hesper Anderson

Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $23

Hesper Anderson, daughter of Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Maxwell Anderson (What Price Glory?, Key Largo), has recorded her difficult coming of age in this pain-filled memoir. The author suffered a privileged childhood replete with a manic, self-obsessed mother, celebrity neighbors, and an idyllic home on South Mountain Road near the Hudson River. Although her father dotes on her, Mabbie Anderson — the beautiful, witty, charming Mab — has little time for her daughter, and Hesper withers in the shade of inattention. The psychological tangle between them serves as the crux of the book (this daughter’s journey of discovery begins, “My mother killed herself on the first day of spring”). The author’s dreamy, soft-focus view of love and appreciation for drama reveal themselves in her style and in the substance of her upbringing. Daddy Anderson instilled in her a literary sense of romanticism detached from reality, while her mother taught her how to lie, characteristics of a fiction writer not highly regarded in a memoirist

This article appears in March 31 • 2000.

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