Kitchen Privileges, Mary Higgins Clark
Kitchen Privileges, Mary Higgins Clark
21 Rating(s)
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Kitchen Privileges
Memoirs of a Bronx Girlhood

Author: Mary Higgins Clark

Narrator: Mary Higgins Clark

Unabridged: 5 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/01/2002


Synopsis

Angela’s Ashes comes home to the Bronx in Mary Higgins Clark’s brilliant, touching, charming, and bittersweet memoir of a childhood during the Depression.

Mary Higgins Clark’s memoir begins with the death of her father in 1939. With no money in the house—the Higgins Bar and Grill in the Bronx is failing and in debt, and worry about it is one of the things that has killed her father—Mary’s indomitable Irish mother (she devotes a chapter to her “Wild Irish Mother”) puts out a classified ad: “Furnished rooms! Kitchen Privileges!” Very shortly there arrives the first in a succession of tenants who will change the lives of the Higgins family and set the young Mary on her start as a writer, while bringing to them all a dose of the Christmas spirit that seemed to have vanished with Mr. Higgins’s death.

Full of hope, faith, memorable characters, and warmth, Kitchen Privileges brings back into sharp, nostalgic focus the feeling of growing up poor, but determined to survive, in a vanished Bronx that was one of white lace curtains instead of a slum, and at a time when everybody was poor and either needed or offered a helping hand.

About Mary Higgins Clark

Suspense author, Mary Higgins Clark has had 51 novels that have been bestsellers in the United States and many other countries, all of which remain in print through 2015. It was through necessity that her career blossomed, but she had always had writing talent and aspirations.

Clark followed a dream in her early career and took time out to be a(at that time) stewardess for PanAm so she could see the world. Just before beginning her exciting new job.....being paid $5 less per week than her secretarial job.......she met William Clark who was so smitten with her that he proposed that she stay in the job for one year, then marry him at the end of that year. And they did just that. The Clarks had five children, and sadly her husband passed away from an extended bout of heart problems in 1964. Also, very sadly, his mother was at his bedside when he died, and she too passed away that very same night.

So, as stated before, out of necessity, Higgins Clark seriously launched her career of writing 51suspense novels with some being adapted to film. She is known as the "Queen of Suspense", she has the ability to serve as a master plotter to slowly create tension for the reader, while giving the appearance that everyone is guilty. Her books feature strong, independent women characters who are the heroines, who are noted for making sensible decisions. Readers tend to identify with these characters as more ordinary people than most novel heroines. Higgins Carter's novels are for adult readers, but because she does not include explicit sex or violence in them, they are also popular with children as young as twelve. Simon & Schuster have published all of Higgins Clark's novels, signed her to a $64 million , four book contract in 1990, and have funded the Mary Higgins Clark Award given to new authors of suspense novels.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Diane

Honest,funny,modest and a recollection of her past life:ups & downs....(paperback!)......more

Mary Higgins Clark's autobiography is as engrossing as one of her popular suspense novels! As a little girl living in the Bronx when there were still fields and meadows, she would probably not have believed that she would someday be worth $140 millions dollars! She has worked hard to get to where sh......more

Goodreads review by Lesley

I have not actually read any of Clark’s book but I always love a good nonfiction about a strong woman! She had many hard things happen to her but she found the will to fight for herself and her family. Quick listen, read by the author!......more

Goodreads review by Rehan

Beautifully written, i simply love it!......more