Primates of Park Avenue: Adventures Inside the Secret Sisterhood of Manhattan Moms
Written by Wednesday Martin
Narrated by Madeleine Maby
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
When Wednesday Martin first arrives on New York City’s Upper East Side, she’s clueless about the right addresses, the right wardrobe, and the right schools, and she’s taken aback by the glamorous, sharp-elbowed mommies around her. She feels hazed and unwelcome until she begins to look at her new niche through the lens of her academic background in anthropology. As she analyzes the tribe’s mating and migration patterns, childrearing practices, fetish objects, physical adornment practices, magical purifying rituals, bonding rites, and odd realities like sex segregation, she finds it easier to fit in and even enjoy her new life. Then one day, Wednesday’s world is turned upside down, and she finds out there’s much more to the women who she’s secretly been calling Manhattan Geishas.
“Think Gossip Girl, but with a sociological study of the parents” (InStyle.com), Wednesday’s memoir is absolutely “eye-popping” (People). Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world—the strange, exotic, and utterly foreign and fascinating life of privileged Manhattan motherhood.
Wednesday Martin
Wednesday Martin, PhD, has worked as writer and social researcher in New York City for more than two decades. The author of Stepmonster and Primates of Park Avenue, she has appeared on Today, CNN, NPR, NBC News, the BBC Newshour, and Fox News as an expert on step-parenting and parenting issues. She writes for the online edition of Psychology Today and her work has appeared in The New York Times. She was a regular contributor to New York Post’s parenting and lifestyle pages for several years and has written for The Daily Telegraph. Wednesday received her PhD from Yale University and lives in New York City with her husband and their two sons.
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Reviews for Primates of Park Avenue
138 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An absorbing peek into the lives of the mothers among the 1% who live in the richest area in the US: the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Is there such a thing as "pop anthropology?" If so, it should probably be left to actual anthropologists, and the publisher is deliberately misleading about her Yale Ph.D., but even so, this book was enormous fun to read as a memoir/social commentary/expose. Women who spend an estimated minimum of $100, 000 a year on personal upkeep, not counting surgery, may as well be a remote tribe, so different are they from the rest of us. The last few chapters took a serious turn, and these chapters (as well as the feminist chapter, about whether these women have any actual power compared to their husbands) were much better than the rest of the book. I fully expect the movie version to excise these darker parts altogether in favor of a "Sex in the City" treatment, focusing on fashion, exercise and catfights rather than power inequity and vulnerability--but the darkside of the glamorous life made the book in my opinion. I guarantee the author's Birkin bag was more than $15, 000, which is why she demurred at mentioning the price, which would have alienated her readers and made a great dismissive sound bite.
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- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5A woman marries a rich man and lives on the Upper East Side as an uber rich stay at home mom for a while. I only skimmed parts of this, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. I thought it was interesting but in the end, pretty shallow and fluffy. I wish it had committed to either being a memoir or an ethnography. As it is, I didn't really feel like I understood who the author was or any of the other friends and enemies she references are, and I certainly didn't buy the pop evo psych explanations for some of the more wacky or disturbing uber-rich behavior.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is smart and funny and I loved every chapter.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Read if you watched Gossip Girl, but don't take anything at face value. I found the "anthropological" parts interesting, but the author may have stretched the connections between observations in the field made by actual anthropologists and personal experiences. But, well, the cover does say memoir.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Social anthropology of upper east side New York mothers - hard to fit in with the group but later caring women when commiserating loss.Had to look up what a Birkin bag even looks like - excessive wealth abounds.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book had interesting comparisons between the author's anthropological knowledge and her experiences as a woman, wife and mother in an affluent part of New York City.
At times it was very funny, and she had some great insights about what truly IS important in life. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I am happy I will never be rich. Seriously. If this book has even a shred of truth to it, we need to wall off the Upper East Side of New York and let the primates eat each other (which I've no doubt they'd be more than willingly happy to do as long as it didn't blow their diets - though I'm guessing there are not many calories in the carcass of an extremely privileged, injected, siliconed, tucked, anorexic nincompoop). I gave it two stars because it did speak a lot to the hazards of conducting participant observation in the field with the dangers of "going native" and losing objectivity, but that's the limit of my generosity. I do believe, however, it will make a hilarious movie - the movie Dr. Wednesday Martin alludes to in the book's conclusion (great use of placement advertising, Dr. Martin).
God, it's been such a tragic day for me. First, there was reading this book, which makes me think evolution needs to begin killing off the exceedingly rich yet exceedingly helpless and nitwitted of this nation's cities. Then, I was tortured by having to listen to Kim Kardashian as the guest for "Not My Job" on NPR's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me!. Our society is doomed! Doomed, I say!
P.S. Did Kim Kardashian even KNOW there is such a thing as NPR, or did she think it was some sort of E! reality spin off channel?!?!
P.P.S. I won't be seeing the movie.
P.P.P.S. Free to some home, one copy of Primates of Park Avenue. Will pay for shipping. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I finally got around to reading last summer's big beach read about a woman who moves to the Upper East Side of New York City and purports to study its female inhabitants as an anthropologist would study a primitive society in the Amazon rain forest. She tries to write from a detached and somewhat humorous point of view, but it really doesn't work because she so clearly wanted to be a part of it all. However I did enjoy the detailed discussion about Birkin bags, so I now (sort of) understand why they are so expensive.A good read for a long plane flight.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The writer moves to the ritziest part of Manhattan, claims this move is an anthropological study, writes a book. She describes the bizarro-lives of extremely wealthy families. There is some social commentary. In particular the question of how much actual power these women have without their husbands is worthy of discussion. However, frankly, this is mostly just wealth porn that allows the rest of us a glimpse into the social stratosphere. Martin is hardly an outsider in any real sense of the word. She's just a newbie trying to be accepted by these largely loathsome people. The fact that purchasing a Birkin bag plays a large role and is the thing many people remember most about the book tips you off of the actual purpose of this book.Nonetheless, there is something exciting about a window into the lives of the 1%. This is also the first book that I've seen that details the daily lives of the women of that class. Martin does have an entertaining voice although she certainly isn't a gifted writer. Therefore, three stars.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An absorbing peek into the lives of the mothers among the 1% who live in the richest area in the US: the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Is there such a thing as "pop anthropology?" If so, it should probably be left to actual anthropologists, and the publisher is deliberately misleading about her Yale Ph.D., but even so, this book was enormous fun to read as a memoir/social commentary/expose. Women who spend an estimated minimum of $100, 000 a year on personal upkeep, not counting surgery, may as well be a remote tribe, so different are they from the rest of us. The last few chapters took a serious turn, and these chapters (as well as the feminist chapter, about whether these women have any actual power compared to their husbands) were much better than the rest of the book. I fully expect the movie version to excise these darker parts altogether in favor of a "Sex in the City" treatment, focusing on fashion, exercise and catfights rather than power inequity and vulnerability--but the darkside of the glamorous life made the book in my opinion. I guarantee the author's Birkin bag was more than $15, 000, which is why she demurred at mentioning the price, which would have alienated her readers and made a great dismissive sound bite.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This was a concept with a lot of promise: a cross between The Naked Ape & Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous, written in the style of Bridget Jones's Diary. The first sign of trouble appears in the first paragraph of the work, where Martin gets her latitudes & longitudes backwards. Did no one bother to proofread this? Apparently not: as has been pointed out repeatedly elsewhere: Martin's timeline defies the laws of physics, most notably having her in the midst of a difficult pregnancy when they are in the process of moving to the neighbourhood described in the book; more likely, this occurred as they were moving out. When this was pointed out to the author, she claimed this was a violation of her privacy: her sex life is nobody's business but her own (& her husband's). It's hardly a violation: my prudish ancestors have been counting months backwards from the birth for centuries: observing that a child born in 2007 could not have caused a difficult pregnancy in 2004 hardly requires peeking into anyone's bedroom.Many other incidents appear to have been exaggerated, or were isolated incidents depicted as common rituals. Martin also attributes great significance to nearly everything, forgetting that sometimes a rose is just a rose, & a well-dressed woman "charging" Martin on the sidewalk may simply be deranged (mental illness does not respect net worth statements).The language of the book was awkward: Martin spells out "dwellings of ground stone" in one of her anthropological spoof "field notes" sections (I assume she means concrete), then expects her readers to know what "zenanas" are.Martin introduces many discussions on really interesting topics, like how money & power play out in the marital relationship, but this never sustains her interest for very long, and we're back to the gossipy tales of crazy-rich living. It's not a tell-all, though: Martin claims to be on the poor side of rich in this 0.1% niche, but admits to having a closet dedicated to her handbags, & remains coy about how large this apartment with the "right number of bedrooms" is.Their relative poverty notwithstanding, she is able to get (her husband to buy her) a legendary Birkin bag without too much trouble - after about 25 pages of telling the reader how impossible this task is, usually requiring many "preliminary" purchases, & a great deal of politicking. Actually: there's a lot of bragging in these pages.Oh: & she's claiming she did this in line with her anthropological training? Her PhD is in comparative literature. With an emphasis on anthropology, to be sure, but there's a great deal of difference between knowing the history of something, & being able to do it. Frankly, where she does explicitly make reference to anthropology, it comes across sounding like she had great fun in a couple of undergraduate classes, but no more.So why a full two stars? The last 25 pages are rather redemptive. I won't spoil the plot twist.In summary: if you take this as a badly-written novel, it's not too bad.