The Arrogant Years

In this much-anticipated new memoir, Lucette Lagnado revisits her first years in America, first in Brooklyn, then at Vassar and Columbia, revealing a coming-of-age interrupted by a bout with cancer at age 16. Its devastating consequences would rob her of her ability to have children and of her “arrogant years” -the years defined by their overwhelming sense of possibility, invincibility, and confidence-leaving her with the lonely echo of her own fears and judgment: “I am not woman enough.” Lagnado looks to the women sequestered behind the wooden screen at her childhood synagogue, to the young co-eds at Vassar in the 1970s, to her own mother and the women of their past in Cairo, and reflects on their stories as she struggles to heal, to make the leap from girl to woman without the grace and strength of her “arrogant years.” “Lagnado traces her mother’s heartbreaking trajectory from the Pasha’s library in King Farouk’s Cairo to the confines of a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, where she tries to reconstruct her vanished home. If doing so proved impossible for the persevering Edith, Lagnado’s memoir, at once an elegy to a parent and to a country, comes close.”-Dalia Sofer, author of The Septembers of Shiraz