Primates of Park Avenue

Primates of Park Avenue: a memoir

Wednesday Martin (Simon and Schuster, 2015)

    What's it like to be a wealthy young wife and mother on the upper East Side of New York? Wednesday Martin's Primates of Park Avenue is not just a memoir, but an anthropological study of a rare and strange way of life. As a child, Martin was fascinated by pioneering anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Jane Goodall. When she grew up and moved to New York, she earned a doctorate in cultural studies and comparative literature. She was well placed to experience, and study, the contrast between the collaborative mothering practices of primitive tribes and the solitary urban mothers around her.

    Those mothers are not merely solitary (armies of nannies notwithstanding), but competitive, verging on cutthroat. The perfect children they are raising require the perfect nannies, tutors, play groups, and schools; the mothers themselves maintain fiendish exercise and makeup routines, and dress to the nines to go out for milk. They also maintain a social hierarchy Martin has to crack, by means that would make a sixth-grader blush: at her son's new school, the other mothers overtly ignore her, and exclude her child from play dates. "It was clear that on the Upper East Side, moms and toddlers had their pecking order worked out and their places set and their dance cards full long before the wee ones were out of their Robeez."

    Why are these women like that? They have everything they could possibly need. (In anthropology-speak, they live in a state of 'extreme ecological release.') They're the richest and least vulnerable people on earth, by most measures. But there is one scarce resource: men. Women of child-bearing age outnumber eligible men by two to one in these precincts, so a woman who lets herself lose status, or look weak, risks getting pushed out of the tree by a younger, more aggressive female. Martin comes close to making us feel sorry for them, or at least see the pathos behind the glossy facade. Keeping up with the neighbors, in a state of self-imposed semi-starvation, is extremely stressful. It's no wonder some women take pills, or become a little too devoted to their afternoon glass of wine.

    Still, the extremity of the circumstances makes the book funny. Witness the observation that very high heels are a declaration that one has a driver at the ready, or the back-of-the-envelope calculation of what it takes to look that good, ("Something like $95,000, on the low end, just to be beautiful enough...") She's not naming names, exactly; the discretion extends to which nursery school she maneuvered her way into, and what her own wealthy, older husband does. But the machinations about acquiring the Birkin bag by Hermes, and worrying about which playgroup can get you into the right kindergarten - if it weren't funny, it would be terrifying.

    Cultural observation often involves the risk of going native, and that's what happened here. It doesn't sound like Martin really minds. "Yes, I found myself wanting smooth blond blond blonder hair, and a Birkin, and a Barbour jacket, and whimsical emerald-green velvet Charlotte Olympia flats with kitten faces on them. And I surrendered." More power to her, say I.

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April, 2016