writing home

The rich are not all that different from you and me. I know, how dare I disagree with F. Scott Fitzgerald, but that was my takeaway after reading “Laura & Emma” by Kate Greathead.

Set on the Upper East Side between 1980 and 1995, this debut novel introduces us to 30-something trust-fund baby Laura, who grew up in a brownstone on East 65th Street between Lex and Third. Her daughter Emma is the product of a one-night stand, the account of which I won’t spoil. (It’s a doozy.)

I was first drawn to the book based on the single-mother-raising-her-daughter-in-the-city plot because it mirrored my own upbringing — almost. I grew up in the Bronx.

I had envied life in Manhattan as far back as elementary school. In fourth grade I told my mother we should move here. As often was the case when I asked for something without factoring the cost, she gave me a curt, “We can’t afford it.”

Before the construct of the conceive-believe-receive mantra became commonplace (or even existed, at least in my outer borough), I put it into practice by telling all my friends that we would be moving downtown, as we Bronxites called Manhattan, figuring that saying it would very well make it so. In turn, they told their mothers, who stopped mine the following Saturday when she was out and about doing her chores. They asked when we would be moving as well as what our new parish would be.

Startled and embarrassed, my mother made her way home, no doubt to kill me. I guess, however, the trek up Fordham Road weighed down with her many grocery bags and packages of house supplies exhausted the fight out of her. When she entered the apartment the best she could do was, “Stop telling stories.”

I read Greathead’s book with interest thinking I would get a glimpse into the more glamorous life I wished I had led but found surprisingly my second reason to embrace this novel. “Laura & Emma” is perhaps the first book about monied Upper East Siders that isn’t reminiscent of a typical galas/private jets/Van Cleef & Arpels episode of “Gossip Girl.”

There are no shopping sprees at Bergdorf’s; Laura hates that activity and is quite proud of her dowdy wardrobe. The superintendent is the de facto doorman of her 96th and Lex building, which the realtor described as “across the street from Harlem.” Laura’s not very social and doesn’t fit with the other UES moms, letting Emma watch TV, eat junk food and befriend the homeless man who camps out on their corner.

Although Laura wants ostensibly to distance herself from her blue-blooded roots, she still gives in to the pull of her privilege. They may live in a non-doorman high-rise, but they reside in the penthouse with the requisite terrace. Emma attends the same private school as her mother did. Laura works at a museum that was once her great-grandfather’s mansion. The place is also used for events and Laura pulls strings with the board of directors to become its wedding planner. She gets paid a full-timer’s salary even though she works part time and takes summers off to enjoy the family’s Buzzards Bay summer home and to be with her daughter. She counters this by volunteering at a women’s homeless shelter. Laura and her brother vie for the favor of their forbidding father in order to get bigger shares of the trust, which Laura swears are not for her but for Emma.

While Laura has one foot in the rarified world she grew up in and the other in the less pretentious one she’s created, Emma becomes a free spirit, rejecting her private school legacy, its students and, as teens do, her mother as well.

I connected with the evolution of Laura and Emma’s relationship, not just as it related to the one I had with my mother, but more so as it parallels the one I have with my own UES free-spirited daughter, Meg.

The best part is that “Laura & Emma” laid to rest the vestiges of my childhood FOMO, and that living in Manhattan is no guarantee of a glamorous life; and it shouldn’t matter if you’re enjoying the one you’ve got.

Lorraine Duffy Merkl is the author of the novels “Back To Work She Goes” and “Fat Chick,” from which a movie is being made.