Janet, My Mother, and Me by William Murray

A memoir of a boy growing up in a household of two extraordinary women. William Murray was devoted to his mother, Natalia Danesi Murray, and to her longtime lover, writer Janet Flanner, and even as a teenager he accepted their unconventional relationship. Flanner was already celebrated for her 'Letter from Paris' in The New Yorker when she met the Italian-born Natalia Murray on Fire Island, New York, in 1940; Murray describes their meeting as a coup de foudre that changed their lives and his own. Growing up between New York and Rome, with his grandmother Ester also in the household, he offers a look at the world in which gay professional women moved in the decades before such relationships became more open and accepted. Murray's mother was a publishing executive and broadcaster, and Murray, who first trained as an opera singer, followed both women into writing, becoming a novelist and for many years a writer and editor at The New Yorker.