North of Crazy: A Memoir

Neltje, an artist, philanthropist and member of the Doubleday publishing family (her full name is Neltje Doubleday Kings), remembers a full life, if not a well-examined one. Neltje and her brother, Nelson, were born into a patriarchal family of alcoholics and raised by a succession of caretakers. She makes her escape by marrying young, only to find herself in an unhappy, emotionally distant marriage. After 12 years, she leaves for Wyoming with her married lover and her two children (whom she had with her husband, John Turner Sargent, president and CEO of Doubleday, 1963–1978) to take advantage of the state’s divorce laws, and she ends up staying, trading the life of an Eastern socialite for that of a Western artist. Like Sallie Bingham, Neltje develops feminist consciousness in parallel with her attempts to wrest control over a trust that treated her as a second-class citizen; when she describes these struggles, her emotions are raw. She glosses lightly over other events (such as being molested by a family acquaintance at age nine), spending more time describing her clothing for the march in Selma in 1965 than on the legacy of her family’s racism. She follows her whims and her lovers, but her often repeated fears over imitating her mother’s self-absorbed parenting are superficial. “My doubts,” she says, “resurfaced and vanished.” She was once told that her abstract paintings made people uncomfortable; “they scared me, too,” she writes, “they were so in-your-face painful.” Unfortunately, she’s less successful at describing that pain with words. (Oct.)