The Looking Glass Brother
The Preposterous, Moving, Hilarious, and Frequently Terrifying Story of My Gilded Age Long Island Family, My Philandering Father, and the Homeless Stepbrother Who Shares My Name
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Peter von Ziegesar had just moved to New York and was awaiting the birth of his first child when a dark shape stepped from the looking glass of his past on to a Greenwich Village street. 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's 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 from the looking glass of his father's new family. Little Peter was an angelic and brilliant young boy 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 fatherhood and the responsibility he feels for his brother, a man with the same name as his, but a man who lives a desperate and very different life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Navigating the life of privilege has been relatively easy for "Big Peter" von Ziegesar but for his stepbrother, "Little Peter", any source of promise falls devastatingly short. Little Peter, now homeless, mentally ill, and gaunt "in half-rotted clothing," was once handsome, blond, and bound for fame as a young violin prodigy. After vagabonding across the West, Little Peter falls asleep in a Montana field and nearly loses both his hands to a harvest combine. In the meantime Big Peter moves from Chicago to Kansas City to New York City, pursuing his writing career, interviewing William S. Burroughs, doing articles on Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, and beginning his life with wife Hali. In 1998 Little Peter returns to NYC "distilled, I thought from his thousand and one mad adventures on the road and a few brief stints in jail". Two personalities caught in each other's orbit; Big Peter provides the life raft while Little Peter slowly lets it sink. "I'd started to keep a record of sorts, a noir journal to mark the dark passages of his mind." Brotherly love is evident here, while drugs, lavish estates, suicide, divorce, philandering, and the back drop of NYC round out a touching inside view of comfort and homelessness.
