Primates of Park Avenue

A Memoir

Wednesday Martin

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476762722
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

An instant #1 New York Times bestseller, Primates of Park Avenue is an “amusing, perceptive and…deliciously evil” (The New York Times Book Review) memoir of the most secretive and elite tribe—Manhattan’s Upper East Side mothers.

When Wednesday Martin first arrives on New York City’s Upper East Side, she’s clueless about the right addresses, the right wardrobe, and the right schools, and she’s taken aback by the glamorous, sharp-elbowed mommies around her. She feels hazed and unwelcome until she begins to look at her new niche through the lens of her academic background in anthropology. As she analyzes the tribe’s mating and migration patterns, childrearing practices, fetish objects, physical adornment practices, magical purifying rituals, bonding rites, and odd realities like sex segregation, she finds it easier to fit in and even enjoy her new life. Then one day, Wednesday’s world is turned upside down, and she finds out there’s much more to the women who she’s secretly been calling Manhattan Geishas.

“Think Gossip Girl, but with a sociological study of the parents” (InStyle), Wednesday’s memoir is absolutely “eye-popping” (People). Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world—the strange, exotic, and utterly foreign and fascinating life of privileged Manhattan motherhood.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Comme Il Faut
• Chapter Two: Playdate Pariah
• Chapter Three: Going Native: Mommy Wants a Birkin
• Chapter Four: Manhattan Geisha
• Chapter Five: A Girls’ Night In
• Chapter Six: A Xanax and a Bloody Mary: Manhattan Moms on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
• Chapter Seven: A Rainy Day
• Chapter Eight: Summary Fieldnotes
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Group Guide
• About Wednesday Martin
• Sources
• Copyright