Eleven Stories High: Growing Up in Stuyvesant Town, 1948-1968

This memoir evokes a girl's coming of age in a postwar New York City planned, "utopian" community.

This poignant memoir of life in Stuyvesant Town, a New York City housing project, describes growing up in what the author deems a "utopia of the fifties." Corinne Demas evokes in convincing detail the friendships, foibles, and fantasies of a girl's coming of age in a "vertical" neighborhood of pets, games, elevator rides, and family life. She follows the process of memory, rather than the conventions of chronology, to take us on a vivid journey of the 1950's and 60's America of Halloween costumes, roller skating, the new T. V. culture, high school dances, and music lessons. She lovingly tells of her father--an unconventional dentist--and her mother, both a traditional housewife and a high school biology teacher.

"I loved every word.... Stuyvesant Town, with its unexpected charm, is as strong a character as any I've encountered in personal narrative." -- Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot's Wife

"Corinne Demas is a wonderful storyteller, and her ability to render anecdotes about times and places gone by--to conjure up the tastes and smells and details of a vanished world--is quite remarkable." -- Jay Neugeboren, author of Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival: A Memoir