Courtesy of The Crown Publishing Group
“The Clancys of Queens” is Tara Clancy’s first book.
By Michael V. Cusenza
He has achieved success
who has lived well,
laughed often, and loved much…”
— Success, Bessie Anderson Stanley
Live. Laugh. Love.
The ubiquitous combination of terms easily could have been the title of Tara Clancy’s moving and memorable memoir, “The Clancys of Queens.”
(It’s our understanding that “Fear and Loathing from Broad Channel to Bridgehampton” has already been used.)
Clancy’s debut tome takes you from an apartment ensconced in a “tiny ad hoc geriatric Italian village” in Bellerose, to a Broad Channel boat shed that came complete with built-in character, all the way out to Onepercenterville, a.k.a. the Hamptons, with the able author as your trusted tour guide to her entertaining existence.
Imagine riding shotgun in Clancy’s tricked-out blue plastic Power Wheels pickup (an endearing, unconscionably slow gift from her mom’s rich boyfriend when Tara was 7) as she paints vivid pictures with punchy prose and cleverly captions a series of short true stories that somehow come together as the life and times of a proud kid from Queens.
“We’ve got no supermarket, high school, pharmacy, or library. Almost everything is on the other side of the bridges at either end of our town,” Clancy writes as she describes the, ahem, small-town charm of 1980s Broad Channel. “For better or worse, we are 2,500-odd people adrift in Jamaica Bay, untethered from the rest of the world. Really. No poetics intended — despite being Queens, Broad Channel isn’t even connected to the New York City sewage lines. Instead, we have septic tanks. Even our sh*t can’t escape.”
Asked why she landed on a memoir for her first foray into author-hood, Clancy said it wasn’t a conscious decision, initially, but sort-of sprang to life from essays and articles she penned for periodicals like The New York Times Magazine and the Paris Review Daily.
“I feel that if you’ve got a story to tell, age shouldn’t matter,” posited the married mother of two boys. “I knew that I had enough material to put together a whole book.”
Clancy also recalled feeling a budding sense of duty and determination as (an increasingly rare) home-grown Gotham girl to publish her piece, to serve up a slice of her city, as she embarked on her maiden literary voyage.
“The last book like this written by a woman like me was ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ — that was 73 years ago,” Clancy said, referencing the Betty Smith classic. “That really inspired me to write – I gotta get my story out there because we need it. I definitely felt motivated by the fact that my voice was missing. Native New Yorkers…we’re kinda disappearing. So if we don’t get these stories out now, it’s not getting done.”
Those of us born and bred in the Big Apple have that appreciation of the moment, that sense of urgency to thank, in part, for a book that really does capture the essence of the one-of-a-kind county — warts and all.
“The Clancys of Queens” might have “a memoir” stamped on the jacket cover, but the easy read feels more like a 230-odd page love letter from Tara Clancy to the beloved borough that helped raise her.
For more information, log onto taraclancy.com.
