The Draw A Memoir [Paperback]

A What We're Reading This Summer Pick byThe Atlantic

The Drawis a spellbinding, coming-of-age tour de force (New York Times Book Review)about a boy striving to make his way up through society and out of a family that has been emotionally and psychologically devastated by economic misfortune.

Lee Siegels father, Monroe, a kind and decent man, accumulates a crushing debt to the company he works for, a real estate firm that has been paying him an advance, or draw, against future commissions. The more he depended on the Draw to live, Lee writes of his father, the more it shrank his life. As the recession hits in the mid- 1970s, Monroe finds himself without commissions, and thus unable to pay back his employer. Fired from his job, he is pursued by the law, loses his wife to divorce, and eventually declares bankruptcy. Lees mother, Lola, confronting a bleak and tenuous future, experiences a breakdown that transforms her into a seductive yet vindictive adversary of Lee, her older son.

To escape his mothers bewildering manipulations and the shame and rage that his fathers fate incites in him, Lee creates an alter ego elevated by literature, music, and art. As he stumbles through a series of menial jobs while trying to succeed as a writer, Lee dreams of the protected space of a great university where he can fulfill his destiny in his work. But in order to attend college, he has to take out loans, unwittingly repeating his fathers trajectory.

Propelled by riveting stories and unforgettable portraits,The Drawweaves a defiant stand against a society in which, as the author observes, the struggle with money can turn someones innocent weakness into a weapon of self-destruction. As much a flesh-and-blood parable of economics as an intimate memoir brimming with harsh introspection, intellectual reverie, and surprising evocations of sexualitythe way you handle money and the wal£-