In The Easter Parade , first published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal. David Sedaris Spring 2025 Tour Book Recommendation “Yates writes powerfully and enters completely and effortlessly into the lives of his characters . . . A spare yet wrenching tale.” ― The New York Times Book Review “An elegant, moving novel, quietly poignant.” ― Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post “Invigorating and even gripping. The dialogue is artful enough to sound natural. In his descriptive prose every word works quietly to inspire the illusion that things are happening by themselves . . . A literary achievement.” ― Paul Gray, Time “Exact, indisputable, and moving.” ― Richard Todd, The Atlantic “Extraordinarily good . . . Written with the force and simplicity of absolute truth.” ― The San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle “The effect is at once cruel and sweet, heartbreaking and brutal . . . The Easter Parade has an astonishing sweep and weight.” ― Stuart O'Nan, The Boston Book Review Richard Yates was the author of the novels Revolutionary Road, A Special Providence, Disturbing the Peace, The Easter Parade, A Good School, Young Hearts Crying, and Cold Spring Harbor, as well as the short story collections Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992. The Easter Parade A Novel By Richard Yates Picador Copyright © 1976 Richard Yates All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-312-27828-1 CHAPTER 1 Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce. That happened in 1930, when Sarah was nine years old and Emily five. Their mother, who encouraged both girls to call her "Pookie," took them out of New York to a rented house in Tenafly, New Jersey, where she thought the schools would be better and where she hoped to launch a career in suburban real estate. It didn't work out — very few of her plans for independence ever did — and they left Tenafly after two years, but it was a memorable time for the girls. "Doesn't your father ever come home?" other children would ask, and Sarah would always take the lead in explaining what a divorce was. "Do you ever get to see him?" "Sure we do." "Where does he live?" "In New York City." "What does he do?" "He writes headlines. He writes the headlines in the New York Sun. " And the way she said it made clear that they ought to be impressed. Anyone could be a flashy, irresponsible reporter or a steady drudge of a rewrite man; but the man who wrote the headlines! The man who read through all the complexities of daily news to pick out salient points and who then summed everything up in a few well-chosen words, artfully composed to fit a limited space — there was a consummate journalist and a father worthy of the name. Once, when the girls went to visit him in the city, he took them through the Sun plant and they saw everything. "The first edition's ready to run," he said, "so we'll go down to the pressroom and watch that; then I'll show you around upstairs." He escorted them down an iron stairway that smelled of ink and newsprint, and out into a great underground room where the high rotary presses stood in ranks. Workmen hurried everywhere, all wearing crisp little squared-off hats made of intricately folded newspaper. "Why do they wear those paper hats, Daddy?" Emily asked. "Well, they'd probably tell you it's to keep the ink out of their hair, but I think they just wear 'em to look jaunty." "What does 'jaunty' mean?" "Oh, it means sort of like that bear of yours," he said, pointing to a garnet-studded pin in the form of a teddy bear that she'd worn on her dress that day and hoped he might notice. "That's a very jaunty bear." They watched the curved, freshly cast metal page plates slide in on conveyor rollers to be clamped into place on the cylinders; then after a ringing of bells they watched the presses roll. The steel floor shuddered under their feet, which tickled, and the noise was so overwhelming that they couldn't talk: they could only look at each other and smile, and Emily covered her ears with her hands. White streaks of newsprint ran in every direction through the machines, and finished newspapers came riding out in neat, overlapped abundance. "What'd you think of that?" Walter Grimes asked his daughters as they climbed the stairs. "Now we'll take a look at the city room." It was an acre of desks, where men sat hammering typewriters. "That place up front where the desks are