Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Katy Lederer's childhood was what one might term unusual. Her mother was an alcoholic; her father became a bestselling writer; and her older brother transformed himself into a homeless New York City hustler. Feeling lonesome at home, Katy also felt the outsider at the pricey boarding school where she and her siblings, as the children of faculty, were entitled to a free education. From within a family where individual cunning was valued nearly as highly as academic achievement, Lederer set out to find her way through a seemingly illogical world.

After graduating from college, Katy joins her family in Las Vegas, where her siblings work as world-class poker players while Mom manages the books. The tense world of gambling is a far cry from the rarified terrain of an elite prep school, and it's not the future Katy's mother had in mind for her: "I thought you'd be the normal one," she said. "I don't want another gambler�. Can't you at least get a job in a casino? As a waitress or something?"

Lederer tells her story with a keen, dry wit and a gimlet eye for the telling details, revealing the colorful people who inhabit her offbeat world. Eventually, Lederer abandons her quest for glory at the poker table, seeking success as a writer. This funny, painful, but ultimately happy memoir is proof that she has found it. (Fall 2003 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Katy Lederer grew up on the bucolic campus of an exclusive East Coast boarding school where her father taught English, her mother retreated into cross-words and scotch, and her much older siblings played "grown-up" games like gin rummy and chess. But Katy faced much more than the typical trials of childhood. Within the confines of the Lederer household an unlikely transformation was brewing, one that would turn this darkly intellectual and game-happy group into a family of professional gamblers. Poker Face is Katy Lederer's perceptive account of her family's lively history. From the long kitchen table where her mother played what seemed an endless game of solitaire, to the seedy New York bars where her brother first learned to play poker, to the glamorous Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, where her sister and brother wager hundreds of thousands of dollars a night at the tables, Lederer takes us on a tragicomic journey through a world where intelligence and deceit are used equally as currency. Not since Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood has a writer cast such a witty and astringently analytic eye on the demands of growing up. An unflinching exploration of trust and betrayal, competition, suspicion, and unconventional familial love, Poker Face is a testament to the human spirit's inventiveness when faced with unusually difficult odds.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Centered on dead-on perceptions of the swirling needs, poses and cruelties of her family, Lederer's debut memoir is less Positively Fifth Street than an alienated New England version of The Liar's Club, and ends up with some of the best of both. Poet Lederer (Winter Sex) winningly tracks her siblings' improbable metamorphosis from New Hampshire private school faculty brats (and occasional degenerates) to world-class card sharks at the Las Vegas poker tables. (The transformation of Katy's father Richard Lederer from quiescent teacher to celebrated author of Anguished English and other language puzzle books happens mostly off-camera.) After parsing the class codes (and anti-Semitism) of her rich peers, young Katy becomes curious about her siblings' mysterious, money-laden reinventions of themselves, eventually following her brother, Howard (with their recovered alcoholic mother keeping his bettor's books), and sister, Annie, to Sin City to stake her own claim. There aren't enough of Lederer's blow-by-blows of learning to play among hardcore pros, tourists and "compulsives," but her descriptive gifts are on display throughout, even in the "ultragibbous" eyes of one of her brother's sports bettor clients. Totaling up her experiences at the $3-$6 tables, Katy chooses writing over poker, but while studying poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, her mother and older siblings' massive accumulation of wealth disappears overnight, with jail looming. Despite loose structuring and too many sketchily detailed events, Lederer hones in on the family's complex relationship to games, money and one another and their efforts to direct the ebb and flow of all three, and will convince even the abstemious of gambling's deep power to alter relationships. (On sale Aug. 12) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The old-timey feel of this memoir belies poet Lederer's being just on the brink of her writing career. From the sepia-style cover photograph (presumably of the author) to the end, the book's tone is one of dreaminess and distance. Time references and segues between stories are not always clear and match the author's frequent comments about her spotty memories. Lederer is nevertheless a talented writer, here crafting a history of her slightly off-kilter, slightly dysfunctional gambling family. Often it is as if she were describing someone else's life. Although the Lederer family was decidedly middle class, living on the grounds of an elite boarding school in New Hampshire where their father taught English, most went on to careers in gambling. Lederer's brother ran a successful sports-betting operation that employed their mother. Her brother and sister (poker champion Annie Duke) play poker professionally, and the author spent time playing poker before graduate school. It's difficult to explain why this book is so compelling, but it's probably because the Lederer family is so quirky and yet portrayed here in such a loving manner. Recommended.-Karen Sandlin Silverman, Lansdowne Friends Sch. Lib., PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews