“It was probably because I was so often taken away from Cambridge when I was young that I loved it as much as I did . . .” So begins this novel-from-life by the best-selling author of Girl, Interrupted, an exploration of memory and nostalgia set in the 1950s among the academics and artists of Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, Florence, Athens: Susanna, the precocious narrator of Cambridge, would rather be home than in any of these places. Uprooted from the streets around Harvard Square, she feels lost and excluded in all the locations to which her father’s career takes the family. She comes home with relief—but soon enough wonders if outsiderness may be her permanent condition. Written with a sharp eye for the pretensions—and charms—of the intellectual classes, Cambridge captures the mores of an era now past, the ordinary lives of extraordinary people in a singular part of America, and the delights, fears, and longings of childhood. Cambridge, Massachusetts, is seven-year-old Susanna’s everything. She’s an anxious child and, as such, takes great comfort in the familiarity of her neighborhood. But at the start of second grade, in the 1950s, her father, a Harvard economics professor, uproots the family for a dark, damp sabbatical in England—where she’s introduced to that other Cambridge. Once the family is back home again, the chapters focus on the minutiae of daily life: boredom in school; her friendship with the son of two psychoanalysts; the complexities of her relationship with her mother; and music lessons with an Indian conductor. Sixth grade is once again spent abroad, this time in Greece, where it’s one hot, dusty field trip after the next. When Susanna returns to Cambridge for the duration, the city’s changed—or perhaps she’s changed—as she notes that her childhood, a mostly unhappy one, has passed. Kaysen, the best-selling author of Girl, Interrupted (1993), offers a melancholic, poignant, and sharply observed account of a precocious child’s struggle to make sense of her place in the family and in the larger world. --Ann Kelley “Twenty years after the publication of Girl, Interrupted , Kaysen's excoriating memoir about the nearly two years she spent in a psychiatric institution at the end of her teens, she's written a sort of prequel. Cambridge, her unflinching, elegiac, quasi-autobiographical new novel, takes us back to the mid-to-late 1950s with a portrait of Susanna as a difficult 7-to-11-year-old at odds with her family, her teachers and herself. The result is both fascinating and heartbreaking, because we know where her abiding unhappiness is going to land her. Verbally gifted, mathematically challenged young Susanna is precocious right down to her moodiness and resentment . . . Kaysen totally nails the dynamic between the sultry pre-adolescent daughter and the sometimes curt mother who, irritatingly, is nearly always right . . . By labeling her clearly personal new book a novel, Kaysen frees herself to shape her material for maximum effect. Her prose is chiseled and powerful . . . Cambridge is steeped in nostalgia—a melancholic ache not just for times Susanna has known, but for times she wishes she'd known . . . But Kaysen doesn't fabricate a happy childhood in Cambridge . Instead, she peels back memories to expose the colossal, obdurate ‘colonnaded marble spine’ of a lost youth.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR “Susanna Kaysen is a wonderful writer. The protagonist of Cambridge, also named Susanna, [is] a bright, sensitive, 1950s elementary school student, getting in the way of herself and others. By the time she’s nine, she’s already mourning her lost youth. At school, she’s bored. She explains, ‘my capacity for disappointing people was bigger than their capacity for putting up with me.’ Susanna is, in other words, the kind of child who will grow up to be a writer. And although Cambridge is often funny, Kaysen resists portraying her narrator’s eccentricities in a precious way; Susanna is truly, convincingly, gloomy and weird . . . Her parents [had] humble beginnings [but] adapted comfortably to a more rarefied life, with dinner guests including potential Nobel winners; the novel’s unapologetic attitude toward privilege can seem refreshing . . . If you’ve ever lived in Cambridge, or just wanted to, there’s a decent chance you’ll embrace the book . . . The best way to enjoy its many charms is to accept it as an idiosyncratic memoir . . . Every page contains terrific sentences full of vivid, surprising descriptions . . . It’s a testament to Kaysen’s honesty that she won’t give false comfort to either her characters or her readers.” —Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review “Kaysen’s skills of both the memoirist and novelist are at play in Cambridge, which might be described as a memoir and a half—a real-life story that has been fleshed out with dialogue and details . . . Kaysen is adept at reproducing the child’s voice, not an easy thing to do in fiction or memo