Dumbfounded: Big Money. Big Hair. Big Problems. or Why Having It All Isn't for Sissies by Matt Rothschild

From the Publisher

What fresh hell is this?

I stopped, dumbfounded. My grandmother was at my bedroom door. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked, surprised but not angry. I looked down at my dress. “Playing school.” My grandmother began stroking her chin. Clearly, there were several ways she could take this conversation. “Matthew, what are you wearing?” I could see that she didn’t really want to ask this question but felt she had to. “A dress,” I said. . . . “And where did you get this dress?” she asked. . . . “I found it?” My grandmother sighed. “So you’ve been wandering around the women’s department at JC Penney? Do you expect me to believe you couldn’t find a better dress than that?”

The only Jewish family in a luxury Fifth Avenue building of WASPs, the senior Rothschilds took over the responsibility of raising their grandson, Matt, after his mother left him for Italy and a fourth husband. But rearing Matt was no small task—even for his sharp-tongued grandmother, a cross between Lauren Bacall and Bea Arthur, and a lady who Matt grew to love deeply.

Matt secretly wore his grandmother’s dresses, shoplifted Barbies from FAO Schwarz, invented an imaginary midget butler who he addressed at dinner parties, and got kicked out of nearly every elite school in Manhattan—once for his impersonation of Judy Garland at a recital. He was eventually sent to a boarding school (his grandmother had to ransom off a van Gogh to get him in). But as funny as his hijinks are now, at the time they masked a Jewfroed, chubby, lovable kid, sexually confused and abandoned by hismother, trying to fit in among the precious genteel world he was forced to live in.

Matt Rothschild—the man David Sedaris could have been if he’d grown up in an esteemed family on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—tells the story of his childhood with humor, honesty, and unlikely compassion for his eccentric relatives, including his mother, in this bitingly entertaining and unexpectedly tender memoir of family dysfunction.

Publishers Weekly

Rothschild, a writer and high school teacher living in Florida, was abandoned by his mother and raised by his grandparents, a retired Jewish couple living in "the most exclusive building in the most exclusive neighborhood" of New York City. The setting is sitcom-perfect, from the headstrong grandmother and exasperated grandfather to the wisecracking servants, and Rothschild's youthful acting out offers much opportunity for humor. At one point, his behavior was so out of hand that one of the few private schools he hadn't been asked to leave would accept him only if his grandparents donated one of their Van Goghs as well. But all is not happy: an early attempt by his mother to reunite the family ends in disaster, and her selfish behavior forces him to care for his Alzheimer's-stricken grandmother while still a teenager. Rothschild has been through a lot, and he's an able storyteller, easily drawing readers' sympathy by layering the emotional drama. If his story seems incomplete, that's probably because it is-the final break with his mother would, from an older author, be the midpoint at which Rothschild turns his life around, but this memoir ends with just the first glimmers of an optimistic future. (Aug.)

Janet Ingraham Dwyer - Library Journal

Here's a notable but hardly atypical scene from first-time memoirist Rothschild's poor-little-rich-boy story: overwrought, 13-year-old Matt runs away from home with a $100 bill and a box of rat poison. When the poison fails to do him in, he takes a cab to Times Square to ask the prostitutes whether he's gay. He gets an answer, gets relieved of his remaining cash, and gets sent back home to face his grandparents, who address the situation by buying Matt a puppy. Clearly, Rothschild has quite a story to tell. Abandoned by his jet-setting mother, he's raised by her indelibly portrayed odd-couple parents: Matt's feisty, irrepressibly opinionated grandmother and storytelling, class-conscious grandfather, the only Jewish family in an exclusive building on Manhattan's East Side. Enduring a childhood of privilege and self-doubt, Matt is dismissed from one elite school after another, befriends a neighbor girl who convinces him to steal bagsful of Barbies from F.A.O Schwarz, and struggles with his weight, his sexuality, and especially his breathtakingly wealthy-and stunningly dysfunctional-family. Rothschild's style serves his story well. Reminiscent of David Sedaris, he is by turns whimsical and brutal, self-involved and self-deprecating. A strong debut; recommended for public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Growing up heavy, Jewish and effeminate on the Upper East Side. Rothschild's dialogue is so sassy, his characters' exits so perfectly executed, that the average reader might be forgiven for assuming his sparklingly witty debut memoir was the draft script for a new HBO series on dysfunctional family life. His mother, a flighty sort given to jetting about overseas and marrying various aristocratic playboys, handed off infant Matthew to her richer-than-Croesus parents. Although practically the only child of noticeably Semitic persuasion in his exclusive corner of Manhattan, he was blessed with a glamorous, globetrotting, bellowing dragon of a grandmother, the book's most intriguing character. Easily overpowering everyone (including his genteel Old World grandfather), she was always doing things like running off to Asia to shoot photographs for six months or storming into his grade school to curse out a teacher who tried to pressure him into being photographed in front of a Christmas tree. ("I'll drop-kick his Santa-loving ass from here to Macy's," she declared.) Heavy-set and with a predilection for dressing in women's clothes, Rothschild wasn't exactly the most popular kid, but his relatively normal adolescent issues get a Dynasty-like kick from his mother's neglect and the stink of vast wealth enveloping the whole family. Feeling like "the hangnail on the manicured hand of the Upper East Side," he got through by playing extreme make-believe and gossiping up a storm. He eventually achieved some stability by moving out of Manhattan, but once away from the family circus, Rothschild's narrative shows some slackness. (His coming to terms with his homosexuality seems particularly perfunctory.) Asection about the author discovering his Jewish faith at college, then haranguing his mother for her lack of belief, is ugly enough to dissipate some of the sympathy prompted by his travails in earlier chapters. Bumpy, but both snappy and deeply felt. Agent: Daniel Lazar/Writers House

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