Primates of Park Avenue
Wednesday Martin
Atria Books
For those who cannot bring themselves to be seen reading actual yummy mummy lit, Wednesday Martin’s record of life among the WEIRD – ‘western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic peoples’ – of the Upper East Side offers a compromise. A memoir dressed as an anthropological study, Primates of Park Avenue details the lives of New York’s female elite: their circuit of ‘cancer dances’, overdressed school runs and bizarre sex-segregated summers in the Hamptons. Martin observes with scholarly diligence until a kind of Stockholm Syndrome takes hold, driving her to purchase the Manhattan geisha’s totem of choice, an $8000 Birkin bag.
If there is a lesson to take from Primates, it is that misogyny has been internalised as a lifestyle, inflicted by cliques of women upon themselves. This, and the grotesque price of maintaining ‘perfection’ (cosmetic upkeep is calculated by Martin as costing $95k per year) makes it difficult when the author asks you to sympathise with her subjects’ upholding social mores as frozen in time as their overly-Botoxed foreheads.
The ‘going native’ trope feels similarly outdated, and unfunny. Martin ends the account with her own relocation to the West Side as a form of redemption, but it does little to improve the bad taste this book leaves behind – like too much kale and Xanax over lunch. If you thought The Wolf of Wall Street was bad, wait ‘til you meet his wife.
Words: Roisin Kiberd
