"For a biographer, looking into one’s own life can be a risky enterprise. For a biographer as accomplished as Hayden Herrera, it has turned out to be a risk worth taking. Her  beautiful, entitled, and rather heedless parents may have failed at making households (they had ten marriages between them), but in the pages of Upper Bohemia the author has found her way home.  Her book is honest, revealing, and deeply felt." — Daniel Okrent, author of The Guarded Gate

“An exotic American group portrait like those of John Singer Sargent.” —Fanny Howe, author of Love and I

“Hayden Herrera’s Upper Bohemia is a two-fold marvel. Her writing evokes the sensual richness of a hyper-alert child’s perceptions with a resonance that calls to mind Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Unlike many memoirists, Herrera never oversimplifies; she embraces the complexity of parents who alternately feasted and starved their children.” —Mary Gordon, author of The Liar’s Wife

“Possessed of an astonishing total recall, Herrera has given an honest, clear-eyed, moment-by-moment sense of the texture of childhood. I was held by the preciseness of her memories and by her refusal to dress them up.” —Sanford Schwartz, author of On Edward Hicks  

“Herrera has a gift for concision, for finding among a wealth of impressions the signal detail that reverberates poetically. Hers is an account that is straightforwardly written, with a clarity that conceals the penetrating quality of Herrera’s mind.” —Alec Wilkinson, author of The Ice Balloon

"Hayden Herrera’s gimlet-eyed memoir captures a world that’s at once glamorous and devastating... It’s a touching, heartbreaking, and exceptional story about class, childhood, and what it means to find purpose in life." —Town and Country

"Excellent... Absorbing...Herrera moves and transports us." — Kirkus Reviews

"Herrera seems to have cultivated her keen powers of observation to survive neglect, upheaval, and worse. But she also recounts the joy she found in nature and other exhilarating experiences as she reveals a little-known realm of insistent liberation, romance, restlessness, recklessness, and the pursuit of beauty." — Booklist

"A rare feat. A riveting story of necessary resilience." — Library Journal

"This is a sparkling portrait of a rarified and complex upbringing." — Publishers Weekly