What is Meryl Gordon reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Meryl Gordon, author of The Phantom of Fifth Avenue.

Her entry begins:

I am addicted to thrillers and newly published fiction -- I love to see how contemporary writers create suspense and hook you on their characters. I just finished reading Julie Glass' latest novel, And the Dark Sacred Night, which is a wonderful unraveling of family secrets and deals with how withholding information can damage multiple generations. I've read all of...[read on]

About The Phantom of Fifth Avenue, from the publisher:

Born in 1906, Huguette Clark grew up in her family's 121-room Beaux Arts mansion in New York and was one of the leading celebrities of her day. Her father William Andrews Clark, was a copper magnate, the second richest man in American, and not above bribing his way into the Senate.

Huguette attended the coronation of King George V. And at twenty-two with a personal fortune of $50 million to her name, she married a Princeton man and childhood friend William MacDonald Gower. Two-years later the couple divorced. After a series of failed romances, Huguette began to withdraw from society--first living with her mother in a kind of Grey Gardens isolation then as a modern-day Miss Havisham, spending her days in a vast apartment overlooking Central Park, eating crackers and watching The Flintstones with only servants for company.

All her money and all her real estate could not protect her in her later life from being manipulated by shady hangers-on and hospitals that were only too happy to admit (and bill) a healthy woman. But what happened to Huguette that turned a vivacious, young socialite into a recluse? And what was her life like inside that gilded, copper cage?

Visit Meryl Gordon's website.

See: Meryl Gordon's five best chronicles of high society.

The Page 99 Test: The Phantom of Fifth Avenue.

Writers Read: Meryl Gordon.

--Marshal Zeringue