The stepparents and stepsiblings kept changing too. As a result, Herrera would move from place to place, parent to parent, relative to family friend, and school to school-eventually following her mother to Mexico. But her early years were also marred by abuse and by absent, irresponsible adults.

For her parents, both painters, the thing that mattered most was beauty-and so her childhood was expanded by art and by a reverence for nature. Upper Bohemia captures the tension between a child’s excitement at every new thing and her sadness at losing the comfort of a reliable family. But underneath, the pain of being a parent’s afterthought was acute. On the surface, Herrera’s childhood was idyllic and surreal. Her parents’ friends included such literary and artistic heavyweights as artist Max Ernst, writers Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy, architect Marcel Breuer, and collector Peggy Guggenheim. These adults inhabited a world that Herrera’s mother called “upper bohemia,” a milieu of people born to privilege who chose to focus on the life of the mind. They saw their father only during the summers on the Cape, when they and the other neighborhood children would be left to their own devices by parents who were busy painting, writing, or composing music. When Herrera was only three years old, her parents separated, and she and her sister moved from Cape Cod to New York City to live with their mother and their new hard-drinking stepfather. Hayden Herrera’s parents each married five times following their desires was more important to them than looking after their children. A “touching, heartbreaking, and exceptional” ( Town & Country) coming-of-age memoir by the daughter of artistic, bohemian parents-set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, Cape Cod, and Mexico.

Hayden herrera upper bohemia