A blunt writer's memoir of "devious, complex" parents

Author Francine du Plessix Gray is a dropper of tiny bombs such as "when I had lunch last year with the Earl of Snowden" into a conversation. But she's not snobbish — engaging and curious, she has a gift for blunt summary statements ("writers are thugs"). Her beautifully groomed eyebrows arch in perpetual surprise. They may have achieved that altitude early on, thanks to her outrageous and unforgettable parents, her stepfather Alexander Liberman and Tatiana du Plessix Liberman.

Gray's memoir, "Them: A Memoir of Parents" (Penguin, 529 pp., $16) won this year's National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography. It documents the desperate flight of Alex and Tatiana, already refugees from the Russian Revolution, from Nazi-occupied Paris to Vichy, France, then to New York. It exposes their total self-absorption as they clambered to the top of New York high society. At one point Francine was diagnosed as malnourished — her parents were always out partying, and no one bothered to tell her to eat.

The Libermans achieved the pinnacle of fame in post-WWII New York. Alex was the editorial director of the Condé Nast publishing empire, and Tatiana designed custom hats for the rich and famous. The young Francine observed, digested and endured it all. In Seattle last week, she talked about her parents, herself and the perils of writing a memoir about people so close to her heart.

Q: Why did you decide to write a memoir about your parents?

A: It's a totally normal impulse on the part of a writer with complex, devious, fascinating parents (Gray names several other writers — Mary Gordon, Colette, Philip Roth — who wrote memoirs of their parents.) It's an impulse to write about them as a confirmation, as a resurrection. Also, if they were great self-inventions, cloaked in an identity that they created, with a vastly different reality beneath the mask. In a way, it's a brutal impulse. But there's an impulse of justice, to set the record straight. It's an act of correction (or will) as much as an act of commemoration. Writers are thugs.

Q: Besides your own memories, what sources did you use?

A: I have kept journals since 1952. I've got 80 volumes of journals. I had the love letters between my mother and stepfather between the fall of France and the time we were reunited in the 1940s. And I had Mayakovsky's (a famous Russian poet who was Tatiana's first love) letters to my mother. My stepfather was very evasive about them. I finally went to his bedside drawer, and there they were. He had a very ambivalent attitude about Mayakovsky. He was proud that my mother was his muse, and resentful that my mother was his great love.

Q: How did their refugee experiences shape their ambitions?

A: They were enormously ambitious, socially ambitious as well as career ambitious. They were determined to have all the creature comforts that had been denied them.

Q. Why did your mother take up hat-making?

A: There has always been something about the making of hats that's been acceptable to the nobility. A girl from a good family could not really get a job as a secretary — the only acceptable thing to do was to be a hat designer. The hat was always an important status symbol in the sumptuary code — noblemen could wear hats that commoners were not allowed to wear. The hat went out of favor in the Kennedy years. Kennedy didn't wear one; Jackie made the pillbox fashionable.

Q: I was struck by your ability to write about your parents both objectively and compassionately. How did you do it?

A: Alex was my stepfather. I didn't have that messy stuff that comes with blood ties. I adored him, but I felt more objective about him than I would about my father. About my mother, I was always ambivalent. I retained their love, but I became an independent person — moving away, marrying a man who had no social or literary pretentions whatsoever. We (she and her husband) both loved them, but he was critical of them.

Q: Did you have any "Aha" moments while researching the book, when you discovered something you didn't know?

A: The most difficult ... There were letters from June or July 1940 (when the Nazis were invading France) and my mother was complaining that she can't find melons. Also, in the letters, there's no mention of my father's death (Gray's birth father, a French aristocrat, was shot down while flying for the Free French, and Alexander and Tatiana became a couple shortly thereafter).

It could have been because she didn't want to mention my father, because the letters were being read and censored by the Vichy government at the time. But the central tragedy of my life was the central happiness of theirs.

Q: Why was your mother so secretive?

A: She had a genuine modesty, physically and emotionally. She never showed herself naked, even in front of her husband. There's a French word, pudeur, that refers to a kind of psychological/puritanical modesty. Not showing yourself. It also applies to sentiment. You don't reveal yourself. She was very modest, physically and emotionally.

The last time she ever saw her mother was at the railroad station (as Tatiana's mother put her on the train for Paris, to get her out of the tumultuous post-Revolutionary Soviet Union).

I asked my mother, "What were your mother's emotions? She said, "Probably one less mouth to feed." It was 1925 — maybe they didn't know they would ever see each other again. Still, that was her way of dodging the question.

Q: What did you make of the "Million Little Pieces" memoir scandal?

A: It didn't bother me. I had nothing to hide ... I didn't need to embellish. What I already had was so extravagant and rich.

If it had been an important book, then was proven to be factually wrong ... but the book was nothing that would ever go down in history.

Q: So many memoirs seem driven by a desire to take revenge on someone who wronged the author.

A: Mine was not driven by revenge, but by a need to commemorate an injustice. Even as a child, I always had this passionate need to correct facts.

My stepfather published a book called "Then." It was his portraits of the celebrity people he had known, people such as Babe Paley, De Kooning, Salvador Dali — all the people he had known in the art world. In his captions, he would say, on such-and-such a date, Françoise de La Renta came into our lives. I would say, Alex, it was 1959, not 1952. He said, "I don't give a damn about facts."

Q: On the book tour, what do people who have read the book ask you about?

A: They ask me how I survived. They want to know how marked I was by the war years. They want to know how it felt to be brushed aside. I say that I sought refuge in my schools. I found alternate families; wonderful people. I created my own little realm of power, my own little kingdom.

Mary Ann Gwinn: mgwinn@seattletimes.com