The Looking Glass Brother
Peter von Ziegesar had just moved to Greenwich Village and was awaiting the birth of his first child when a dark shape stepped from his past. The Looking Glass Brother is Peter von Ziegesar’s remarkable memoir of a life that began in the exquisite enclaves of Long Island’s gilded age families and is now lived, in part, as the keeper of his homeless and schizophrenic stepbrother, Little Peter. The Looking Glass Brother is a feast of memories from one of the last, great estates on Long Island: Peacock Point. Summers were filled with the glistening water of the Long Island Sound, pristine beaches, croquet games, butlers in formal wear serving dinners and an endless stream of cocktails. When, after a string of affairs Peter's father left his mother and remarried, the idyll was broken and several stepchildren, including Little Peter, entered von Ziegesar’s life. Little Peter was an angelic and brilliant young boy, a violin prodigy called by a teacher, “the next Paganini,” who spiraled down during adolescence to become one more homeless man living on the street. In this big-hearted memoir, Peter von Ziegesar mixes memories of life on Peacock Point with the turbulent joys of urban fatherhood and the responsibility he feels for his brother, a man with the same name as his, but who lives a desperate and very different life.
Reviews & Advanced Praise
“A piercing, thought-provoking portrait of a many-branched American family. Peter von Ziegesar’s cinematic eye and exceptional fluency in diverse perspectives make him an adventurously empathic biographer and audaciously candid memoirist.” -- Donna Seaman, Booklist Starred Review
“Shines with emotional veracity, sensory precision, cosmic absurdity...and steadfast love.” -- The Kansas City Star
“One of those New York stories of privilege and downfall.” -- New York Daily News
“Brotherly love is evident here, while drugs, lavish estates, suicide, divorce, philandering, and the backdrop of NYC round out a touching inside view of comfort and homelessness.” -- Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review
“A vivid, frequently elegiac memory piece... It’s as if characters wandered out of an Auchincloss novel to encounter Kerouac’s bunch.” -- Kirkus Reviews
“Powerful, interesting and often laugh-out loud fun.” -- John Nichols, author of The Sterile Cuckoo and The Milagro Beanfield War.
“A unique lyrical voice, both brave and loving, as von Ziegesar retells a dark, very personal story.” -- Stephanie LaCava, author of An Extraordinary Theory of Objects; A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris
“Packed with the intimacies of an old-monied family, the story moves between the family's wealthy preserve on Long Island Sound and the grubby drug streets of New York City in the 1990s and early Teens. It is a candid and personal story that seeks to show and understand the forces that both tear apart and draw together a father and his two sons, even as all three wrestle with their personal demons.” -- Lou Ureneck, author of Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly Fishing and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska
“Elegantly constructed and written with both stringency and heart, the Looking Glass Brother fluently braids memories of an ultra-privileged childhood and the bleak realities of mental illness, substance abuse and homelessness today. Peter von Ziegesar has the gift for creating rounded characters and the brother of the title comes alive as a figure of compelling, if heartbreaking paradox, while the portrait of the clueless father is the most vivid of its kind I've read since This Boy's Life.” -- Eli Gottlieb, author of The Boy Who Went Away and The Face Thief