Contemporary Authors

• The Clancys of Queens: A Memoir Crown (New York, NY), 2016

• Tara Clancy - https://www.taraclancy.com/about

  Tara's stories have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Rumpus, and The Paris Review Daily. She is a Moth GrandSlam winner, frequent host of The Moth Mainstage live shows, and has told stories on the Moth Radio Hour, NPR's Snap Judgment, The Story Collider and Risk! Her memoir, The Clancys of Queens, will be published by Crown this October.
  Originally from Queens, Tara now lives in Manhattan with her wife and two sons.

• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2016/12/12/504970787/when-a-professor-laughed-at-her-queens-accent-writer-tara-clancy-doubled-down

  When A Professor Laughed At Her Queens Accent, Writer Tara Clancy Doubled Down

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  December 12, 20164:22 AM ET
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  The Clancys of Queens
  The Clancys of Queens
  by Tara Clancy

  Hardcover, 247 pages purchase

  Tara Clancy has made a career sharing honest, funny tales about her life. Now she's put those stories into a new memoir called The Clancys of Queens. Clancy comes from a big, New York, Irish-Italian family. She was the sole only child in her extended family, and she spent her childhood bouncing between her maternal grandparents' house, her dad's converted boat shed and her mom's boyfriend's Hamptons estate (which she often traveled to via stretch limo).

  A former bartender and a proud member of the working class, Clancy also has a thick Queens accent. "Unfortunately, people hear [my accent] and they don't think, 'Now there's a person who popularized quantum electrodynamics,' " she says. "They hear it and they make judgments."

  Clancy tells NPR's David Greene that she tried to lose the accent in college, and actually came pretty close. "And then I was in a class and I had to read a little section of Twelfth Night, the part of Feste. And the word h-e-r-e was in it, which I say hee-ah. ... And I read the line and I just hear this booming laugh, and I stopped and I look around and the big laugh had come from the professor. And instead of feeling mortified, I felt defiant."

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  Interview Highlights

  On when she realized she had stories worth telling

  It was kind of at the very tail end of college. I took a writing class on a whim, one playwriting class, and I instantly started writing autobiographical stuff. And people were like, "What we really like from your work is the character that's most based on you and the monologues." And I was like, "That's lovely. Um, you know, you're basically telling me that I'm a narcissist." ... And it ended up working out that way. I started telling stories onstage and then I got involved with The Moth. And The Moth, really — people, when they hear my literal voice, you know, they realize that it's missing in literature and in pop culture. You know, there's really an appalling lack of work from working-class women.

  On her own preconceived notions about a regular, Joe Bird, at the bar where she once worked

  So Joe Bird was a guy that had the south Boston accent — I knew that's where he was from. He came in in, you know, flannel shirts, construction boots. And he was a heavy drinker, but great guy, very sweet, good tipper. And so this one time it's just he and I in the bar and I ordered some Chinese food for lunch and the delivery guy comes and I end up getting into a fight because he had overcharged me. And the delivery man was not a native English speaker, and, you know, and between my accent and how fast I talk, you know, neither am I, right? So we're talking past each other, but it's getting heated.

  And so finally Joe Bird just stands up and gets in between us. And I think, like, this is it, right? I mean he's just gonna knock him out you know? And he started speaking to the guy slowly and calmly and completely in Chinese. ... Calmed down everything. I mean, but it was mind-blowing. I mean, they're basically patting each other on the back and they're doing the like, you know, "It's all good bro," but in Chinese. ...

  Enlarge this image
  Clancy's writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The New York Times and The Paris Review Daily.
  Ashman Kipervaser/Courtesy of Crown
  Even though I, you know, am a lot different than what people think a working-class New York woman would be ... I had judged this guy. I just thought he was this construction worker guy. I mean, it turns out he had been back and forth to China, had taught himself Chinese. I have judged just the way that people have judged me.

  On growing up in her grandmother's house

  So my grandmother — like, a dustpan was a luxury. The other thing that was an extravagance was Tupperware, you know, naturally. So instead of Tupperware my grandmother just used all of the old plastic ricotta containers, which is fine except that it meant that everything was, like, hidden. You know, you didn't know what was in what jar. ... Everything was ricotta cheese or like Mancini red peppers, and then you'd open it and, you know, instead it would be like sausage. It was like a little scavenger hunt, you know. You didn't know what you were gonna get, what you were gonna eat. ...

  She was a Depression-era child. It meant something to her that everyone knew that I had enough to eat. And so, in her mind — and this is really true — in her mind if I was to take a piece of candy at a neighbor's house, she presumed they would instantly think, "That kid must be starving — she ate a butterscotch!" So I would get a lecture before we went to anybody's house. Like, "If anybody says, 'Do you want a piece of candy?' you say, 'No, I'm full. Thank you.' "

• NBC News - http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/author-tara-clancy-offers-rare-working-class-queer-voice-n671771

  QUOTED: "The conflict is that I'm a f-cking butch dyke born in a trailer, and I'm happy and still alive—that's the nuance. ... Maybe if I was some rich straight girl, then it would be interesting to write about all this terrible stuff. But if you know me, I'm not lying—I'm happy! Things worked out for me. I measure my life in those happy moments and in the people that I've met. I'm sorry, but I think we need a little more of that."

  OCT 24 2016, 11:32 AM ET
  Author Tara Clancy Offers Rare Working-Class Queer Voice in Literature
  by MARY EMILY O'HARA
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  Author Tara Clancy bears a thick Queens accent, a fast-disappearing trait within the borders of New York City. "I come from the Archie Bunker section of Queens," Clancy told NBC OUT with a smirk in her voice. As a working-class, fifth-generation native New Yorker with deep roots in the borough's Irish and Italian neighborhoods, the 36-year-old says she is well aware that she was more likely destined to become a plumber than an author with bylines in the Paris Review and the New York Times. Adding to this jumble of rare traits is the fact that Clancy is visibly, unmistakably queer.

  Author Tara Clancy taraclancy.com
  Clancy's first book came out earlier this month. A memoir unambiguously titled "The Clancys of Queens," it tells the story of a class-jumping city childhood spent shuttling between her Irish cop father's run-down bay-side shack in Broad Channel and her mom's boyfriend's luxurious Hamptons summer estate. The stories are populated by an extensive cast of longtime New Yorkers: family members with strong Irish and Italian roots, regulars at the Queens watering hole where Clancy's dad hangs out, scrappy public school kids and endless cousins attending First Communion parties.

  With all of these factors combined, Clancy's memoir is the first book by and about working-class New York native women to be published since "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" came out 73 years prior.

  "I've sat in bookstores talking to clerks, I've literally talked to everyone about this. It's true," Clancy said of the 73-year gap. "And that's a long time—that's my mother's entire lifetime. Even when there was a working class cultural explosion in the city, there was nothing from the women. And now we're going away. How about you hear from us just one more f-cking time? It's like a swan song."

  The Clancys of Queens: A Memoir Crown
  (Full disclosure: I first met Clancy two years ago while working as a bartender on the city's Lower East Side. Clancy had spent years tending bar at her family's joint in the West Village, and we quickly bonded over the unique intersections we shared—two working-class, Irish Catholic lesbians New York City natives who basically grew up in bars and somehow became writers despite generational obstacles in education and access. It's an improbable description for any individual person, and to meet your doppelgänger in that sense seems downright impossible.)

  In 2016, native New Yorkers often surprise city residents. You hear a lot of "Wow, you grew up here?" and "You're like, the second person I've met who's actually from here!" It's a surreal experience to live in a city flooded by 16 million people during business hours, most of whom apparently aren't from the area. For native New Yorkers over 35, the city is an unrecognizable departure from the one they were raised in. You may still be able to walk past your elementary school, but chances are it's now surrounded by massive real estate developments, boutiques and rich suburban expats.

  New York City, like most metropolitan areas across the U.S., has been transformed by the hurricane of gentrification and reverse white flight. City natives embedded for generations can largely no longer afford the skyrocketing rents, while the lucky ones opted to cash in and sell family homes in order to become millionaires. Clancy's family, like most, fell victim to the former.

  Economic class is not often discussed in the LGBTQ community, but Clancy notes that for her, class trumps other aspects of identity and becomes the primary glue that draws like-minded people together.
  "I am the last remaining member of my family in New York City," Clancy, who also notes that she has over 40 first cousins alone, said. "They've all gone somewhere: Florida, North Carolina, Georgia. Those are cheap, so that's the bulk of where they're going. The South Shore of Long Island and Jersey in the suburbs. The blue collar core of New York City is disappearing, that's for sure."

  Clancy is the only member of the family to make a move from Queens to Manhattan. Once firmly ensconced among other queers and artists in the the Lower East Side, where she moved in her mid-20s, Clancy started telling stories at The Moth's live events. Soon she was hosting The Moth, and her quick-witted tales told in a charmingly old-school accent were picked up by NPR's "Snap Judgment, Risk! and The Story Collider." Clancy still lives in the neighborhood, in a rent-stabilized apartment with her wife Shauna and their two kids. She's highly aware of being the last man standing when it comes to working-class flight and credits her decision to cling to the city to the fact that she's gay.

  Clancy's coming-out story was one of quick acceptance among family, but she still told NBC OUT that the far side of Queens "wasn't the easiest place to be" for a young queer. "The Clancys of Queens" details the time Tara's mom flew her teenage daughter all the way to West Hollywood to meet the one butch lesbian the family knew—in hopes that it might inspire young Tara to realize what everyone else apparently already knew. Clancy's dad took a bit more convincing, but by the end of an hours-long argument, he finally relented and offered up a charmingly Irish sentiment: "Ah, screw it. At least now we have two things in common—whiskey and women!"

  Timed with the book's release, Clancy stars in a series of short videos that visually guide readers through some of the main locales related to "The Clancys of Queens." There's the shack in Broad Channel, the house where "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" author Betty Smith lived and most strikingly—there's the women of Queens. Surrounded by her mom and a roundtable of Queens women, Clancy stands out as distinctly queer. No one seems to care.

  "I don't see that thing of working-class people being less progressive or less open. That's not the experience of my life," Clancy said, refuting stereotypes. "And it isn't progressive, artsy East Village. Everyone's, like, construction workers: 'That's Tara, she's a dyke, nobody gives a shit.'"

  "The Clancys of Queens" is, in part, a coming-out story. But moreover it's a story rarely told, of the Venn Diagram where queerness meets class and where one young person manages to be an outsider and an insider at the same time, everywhere she goes. The story of Clancy's childhood—of darting between the grimy handball courts of Queens and a pristinely manicured Bridgehampton croquet lawn—parallels the very working-class way she later stumbled into literary stardom. Clancy was working at a gym on Delancey street, reading the New York Times on the job, when a literary publicist approached her and said she seemed "interesting." The same publicist, said Clancy, walked her through the steps of writing a pitch email to an editor—and lo and behold, Clancy's very first story was soon published in the New York Times.

  "I never would have wrote another thing if that hadn't have happened," Clancy said. "I would have just been like, time to be a plumber! I was otherwise pretty afraid, thinking it wasn't going to be good enough."

  Economic class is not often discussed in the LGBTQ community, but Clancy notes that for her, class trumps other aspects of identity and becomes the primary glue that draws like-minded people together. It's also the source of a lot of annoying stereotypes she's encountered in reaction to her work—primarily, the idea that a lack of financial wealth equals misery. Clancy said the main criticism of her writing and storytelling is that there's "not enough conflict."

  "The conflict is that I'm a f-cking butch dyke born in a trailer, and I'm happy and still alive—that's the nuance," Clancy said. "Maybe if I was some rich straight girl, then it would be interesting to write about all this terrible stuff. But if you know me, I'm not lying—I'm happy! Things worked out for me. I measure my life in those happy moments and in the people that I've met. I'm sorry, but I think we need a little more of that."

• Irish Central - http://www.irishcentral.com/culture/entertainment/unapologetically-working-class-queens-writer-tara-clancy-on-her-rich-and-varied-life

  QUOTED: "“I think portrayals of working class women in New York don’t really exist. ... Half the reason I wrote this book was because I was not the biggest reader in the world, I did not go to writing school, I was a bartender, born and raised in the bartending business. Then one day someone gave me a copy of a Richard Price book called Lush Life that was set in the Lower East Side and featured the 7th Precinct where my father had been a cop.”
  "I want this but written by a woman."

  Unapologetically working class Queens writer Tara Clancy on her rich and varied life
  Cahir O'Doherty @randomirish October 10, 2016 12:00 AM
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  Author Tara Clancy.Author Tara Clancy.
  Tara Clancy had an ordinary Irish American upbringing in Queens until her mother met a multimillionaire and their lives were split between working class Brooklyn, Broad Channel in Queens and the multi-million dollar mansions of Bridgehampton. CAHIR O’DOHERTY talks to the unapologetically working class writer about her unexpectedly rich and varied life and her new memoir, The Clancys of Queens.

  Nothing in Tara Clancy’s life looked like it was headed for the Hamptons. Weekdays she lived with her mother’s Italian American clan on 251st Street in Brooklyn.

  Then on the weekends she stayed with her Irish American cop dad in Broad Channel, Queens, the island off of Rockaway that had no supermarket, no high school and no pharmacy but tons of little bars.

  After her parents divorced when Tara was two, her mother’s life took a turn that no one expected. She began to work for a self-made multimillionaire first as a housekeeper, then as a secretary, ultimately becoming his girlfriend.

  It was as if a door opened in their lives to a land they’d never dreamed of. Instead of just visiting her dad in Broad Channel (the porta-potty assembly line of America) suddenly Clancy was spending alternative weekends being ferried to Bridgehampton in a stretch limonene or a private jet.

  Still a child when her mother’s unexpected new chapter commenced, Tara made the adjustment with the unblinking facility of the young, finding herself as comfortable in Brooklyn and Broad Channel as she was taking dips in an Olympic sized pool in a Bridgehampton mansion.

  But besides all the millionaire bling, what the man Clancy refers to only by his first name, Mark, also gives her is his time. He talked to her like an equal, he asked her searching philosophical questions, he sought her opinion and he listened to her replies.

  For Mark it was after dinner conversation, but for Tara it was life transforming. She still talks with the you kidding me Queens accent she grew up with, but her life has been enriched and The Clancys of Queens, her new memoir, makes it clear.

  Book cover for Tara Clancy's "The Clancys of Queens."2
  Book cover for Tara Clancy's "The Clancys of Queens."
  A love poem to the borough, her mother and the singular man who showed her a world outside of Broad Channel, it’s a beguiling tale especially well told. Clancy herself calls it the anti-misery memoir.

  “I think portrayals of working class women in New York don’t really exist,” Clancy tells the Irish Voice. “Half the reason I wrote this book was because I was not the biggest reader in the world, I did not go to writing school, I was a bartender, born and raised in the bartending business.

  “Then one day someone gave me a copy of a Richard Price book called Lush Life that was set in the Lower East Side and featured the 7th Precinct where my father had been a cop.”

  It was a birthday book, which Clancy read and became obsessed by. She held up the book to a clerk in the famous Strand Bookstore on Broadway and said, “I want this but written by a woman.” The clerk replied, “Me too, it doesn’t exist.”

  In fact, to her incredulity, Clancy figured out that the last notable household name book written by a working class New York woman was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which was written 73 years ago.

  “It’s been a lifetime, nearly a century. I’ve been spouting that fact all over town. It was the impetus to go, f*** this, I’m going to give it a whirl. I just have to get this story down. I’m not going to let a measly thing like not having any experience or possibly having no talent get in my way.”

  She started writing. Thinking of recent TV depictions of Queens life, she could only come up with two-dimensional stereotypes.

  “Here’s this hairdresser, here’s this maid, here’s this Scorsese film with one second of a lady in a house dress before they cut back to DeNiro.”

  One thing her own story was not was two-dimensional. The Clancys of Queens confirms what you suspect growing up in Queens is like, while simultaneously blowing your suspicions out of the water.

  None of the people in Clancy’s life are working class stereotypes. They’re complex, thoughtful and impressively broad-minded when it becomes clear that Tara is gay.

  “Even my dad, a Republican Irish Catholic. He’s had gay friends. He had a moment with me and then he said, ‘All right. It is what it is.’

  “People in New York can look down on working class people. If my parents had gone to Harvard and Yale and wore wooden jewelry no one would ask me why were they so accepting? We’re not morons.”

  Clancy’s mother emerges as the quiet center of the book, and her kindness and foresight are made plain by example. When she suspects Tara might be gay she flies with her across the country to Los Angles to visit her best friend Rosemary Gallagher, a leather jacket wearing, tough as nails lesbian from Far Rockaway.

  “When you’ve got a girl who’s born in Queens who’s a lesbian, and not a little one, a real big one, it’s supposed to be tragic. But it f***ing wasn’t. I’m writing a portrait of these happy people who have a great time and love each other,” Clancy says.

  By introducing her to Rosemary her mother was showing her here’s a butch grown woman and you can be this.

  “I’m a parent now myself and I understand the length she’d go to as a parent to fly her kid across the country to give her an example.”

  Tara’s mother led by her own example, too. Many women would have surrendered what they’d built up for themselves when a man like Mark enters the picture, but that’s not how it played out.

  “My mother was never a damsel in distress waiting for a knight in shining armor. Her attitude was f*** you, I’m proud of who I am. She was the first woman in her family to have a career. She wanted to work. She raised her kid her way, on her dime.”

  When it became clear that her relationship with Mark was serious, she nevertheless decided he was not going to move in and let him take over her life.

  “That meant that 95 percent of my life was a Queens life, the rest was taking a plane or a limo to Bridgehampton.”

  Clancy used to call her conversations with Mark, who has now passed, “the moon and the stars” talks because they would reflect life on earth, the infinity of space, and what it all meant. In their own way they were a gift as beautiful as her mother’s determination.

  “He talked to everyone like they were his equal because he was this self-made man. He wasn’t old money. Even a 15-year-old kid from a rough part of Queens. What a gift that was.”

  Meanwhile, Ireland for Clancy also felt a lot like home. “When my dad remarried he married an Irish woman who came here in her twenties so I grew up going to Ireland to visit my stepmom. She came from Inchicore. What a laugh,” Clancy says.

  “We were the same on either side of the pond. It was Queens east!”

  In The Clancys of Queens, it’s the small moments that you hardly notice that contain the power to change your life. Forget the dramatic signs or revelations, just a kind word or a second glance at the right moment can be the thing that saves you.

  This powerful new Irish American memoir has the power to make you laugh, cry and miss your subway stop. Don’t miss it.

QUOTED: "She gives a fantastically vivid view into her many worlds."

The Clancys of Queens
Bridget Thoreson
Booklist.
113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p29.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
The Clancys of Queens. By Tara Clancy. Oct. 2016. 256p. Crown, $27 (9781101903117). 818.
The limo would arrive outside the converted boat shed in Queens, where Clancy lived with her father. Every other weekend, it would whisk the
girl away to the Hamptons estate of her mother's boyfriend. There she could luxuriate in a custom lagoon pool or drive her Power Wheels pickup
around the grounds, which included gardens, a croquet court, and a barn and cottage in addition to the main house. It was a far cry from the
cracked asphalt of her native Queens, but, as she remembers in this laugh-out-loud memoir, she was able to leap the social strata with ease.
Clancy's writing crackles with wit and candor, whether recounting her early years with her tough-as-nails Italian grandmother or detailing her
would-be badass high-school exploits. The varied settings of her childhood, like the nautical-themed bar with regulars, including English Billy
and a tall, mustachioed man known as Daisy, are full-fledged characters in themselves. As Clancy whirls with feverish tomboy energy from one
escapade to the next, she gives a fantastically vivid view into her many worlds.--Bridget Thoreson
Thoreson, Bridget
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "The Clancys of Queens." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 29+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755022&it=r&asid=6b587d73bf4e615bf4b508efb1937f28. Accessed 10 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463755022

---
QUOTED: "The heart of Clancy's thoroughly enjoyable narrative lies in her examination of life in the spaces between social classes."

4/9/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491800288648 2/2
The Clancys of Queens: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly.
263.30 (July 25, 2016): p62.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The Clancys of Queens: A Memoir
Tara Clancy. Crown, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-1-101-90311-7
Clancy's debut, an intimate coming-of-age chronicle, captures the circumstances of her multi-class upbringing as the neighborhood "rat" of the
Broad Channel section of Queens, N.Y.; a part-time member of "the Geriatrics of 251st Street"; and a weekender at the upscale seaside
community of Bridgehampton. The reader navigates through this lighthearted memoir with the help of a sharp-tongued, hip-hop-loving sneaker
enthusiast whose relentless attempts at disrupting the tranquility of nearly every situation make up the bulk of the antics covered in the book's 21-
year sprawl. The rest come from an eclectic cast of friends and family that include Grandma Rosalie Riccobono, an Italian-American matriarch
whose colorful curses serve as her everyday punctuation; Rosemary, a self-described "rebellious, alcoholic, soon-to-be-heroin-addict, giant butch
built of tough Rockaway Irish stock"; and the regulars at Gregory's Bar and Restaurant, the nautical-themed neighborhood watering hole. Set
against the grunge and rap backdrop of the late 1980s and early '90s Queens, the heart of Clancy's thoroughly enjoyable narrative lies in her
examination of life in the spaces between social classes, and the threads of humanity shared equally by the local pothead high schoolers, antiquecollecting
Hamptons businessmen, and the Irish-American cops of New York City. (Oct.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Clancys of Queens: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 25 July 2016, p. 62. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285530&it=r&asid=9f7a46882711b94d4ec03a7af9c3ce4a. Accessed 10 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285530

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2016/10/the-clancys-of-queens-by-tara-clancy/
  Word count: 2082

  QUOTED: "That Clancy’s personal chronicle is not the bright shiny output of the memoir industrial complex is somewhat of a relief; instead we get an anthropological report of a disappearing world of white, ethnic, working-class New Yorkers, and we hear from working-class women who are often silent in literature."
  "There’s more stand-up comedy here than self-analysis, as if Clancy sees the tough topics coming and turns away from them. Favoring portraiture over confession, Clancy avoids the coming-of-age clichés, but she also avoids the kind of subject matter that readers might find more meaningful."

  As the daughter of a divorced Italian-American social worker from Brooklyn and an Irish-American cop from Queens, Tara Clancy had an unusual childhood in 1980s New York City. She hopscotched among her father’s converted boatshed apartment, her feisty Italian grandparents’ home, and her mom’s millionaire boyfriend’s Hamptons estate. A born storyteller, Clancy has turned her ability “ to jump social strata in a single bound” into wonderful tales as a Moth GrandSlam winner and an essayist in the New York Times, The Paris Review Daily and The Rumpus. Her new memoir, The Clancys of Queens, contains these pieces and expands on them.

  Clancy’s keen observational humor and authentic working-class New Yawkese survive the transition from stage to page as she crafts a love letter to the family that raised her.

  When I twist the mental radio-tuner dial of my memory as far back as it’ll go, I get staticky snippets of my parents and me from my earliest days, but that sweet crystal-clear reception actually first comes in on the time I spent with my grandparents. In other words, as best I can remember, life begins for me in a tiny ad hoc geriatric Italian village on 251st Street in Bellerose, Queens.

  With both my mom and dad working double-time after their divorce, starting at age three I spend the weekdays in the care of my grandma, Rosalie Riccobono, who lived, of course, with my grandpa, Bruno “Ricky” Riccobono, who in turn shared a two-family house with my great-aunt, Mary Zacchio, that just happened to be next door to the homed of two other Italian-American septuagenarian couples, Tina and Lenny Cirranci, and Anna and Joe Paradise. And though I was with my parents on weeknights and weekends, bouncing between their vastly different worlds, my most vivid early memories are born in this four-hundred-meter stretch of street, in these three abutting houses, with these seven elderly Italians.

  Clancy sketches these people with telling details and great affection. Her grandpa calls her “Shrimpy” and is “as close to Buddha as an Italian-born, Brooklyn-bred, truck-driver-turned-life-insurance-salesman has ever been.” The Carrancis’ house “was its own universe of periwinkle and crystal, with the smell of Aquanet and Chesterfields imbedded in the wall-to-wall carpeting.” The Paradises’ sunlit kitchen was “full of glowing, seventies-era, harvest-gold appliances” and a watered-down glass of orange juice always waiting for young Tara. Grandma peppers her speech with her favorite expression: fahngool. (Clancy helpfully translates: “Fahngool is the Italian American pronunciation of the slang word vaffanculo, which translates to “go do it in the ass” though it is used more like ‘fuck off.’ Either way, it’s not a nice thing to yell at a five-year-old. But Grandma means nothing by it. ‘Fuck’ is just her go-to, catchall punctuation.”) Clancy’s world expands to include her mother’s boyfriend’s Bridgehampton world of limousine rides, lazy country afternoons, and existential after-dinner conversations.

  Tara Clancy
  Tara Clancy

  People die, people marry, relatives move away. As Tara gets older, the foundation of her life shifts a bit. She focuses on classmates rather than family. She’s always been hyperactive, rule-breaking, “untethered,” but by the age of ten she is “a tried-and-true child chameleon, a real-life little Zelig who knew how to go from being a barfly at a Queens local hangout to a summertime Bridgehamptonite to an honorary septuagenarian at the drop of a dime.” This is one of the very few glimpses of Tara Clancy’s psyche that she allows us.

  As a memoir, The Clancys of Queens doesn’t exactly fit the confessional mode. It’s less about Tara Clancy and more about the people who nurtured her. It doesn’t follow the sweep of sin, sorrow, and redemption that we’ve come to expect from autobiography. That Clancy’s personal chronicle is not the bright shiny output of the memoir industrial complex is somewhat of a relief; instead we get an anthropological report of a disappearing world of white, ethnic, working-class New Yorkers, and we hear from working-class women who are often silent in literature.

  But for all the life these sketches evoke, they also have an airless quality, as if they’ve been overworked and put under glass for display. The reminiscences are almost exclusively from a child’s point of view—not someone older looking back, but a child in the moment—and this can come off as cutesy and simple-minded. I craved more context and a broader picture. There are hints of darker, more adult circumstances that may have had a deeper impact than, say, a middle school softball teammate’s dangerous slide on the asphalt, but Clancy is stingy with these larger points. Maybe the Oprah-fied memoir writers busily journaling “my story of me” have taught me to expect a specific narrative arc of certain life milestones, but I found Tara Clancy to be a bit of a tease, offering up breadcrumbs that quickly lead nowhere. There’s more stand-up comedy here than self-analysis, as if Clancy sees the tough topics coming and turns away from them. Favoring portraiture over confession, Clancy avoids the coming-of-age clichés, but she also avoids the kind of subject matter that readers might find more meaningful.

  Tara Clancy bopped from working-class Brooklyn and Queens to the moneyed Hamptons and educated Manhattan; from public schools to NYU; from falling under Shakespeare’s spell to taking the stage at the Moth—and she was accompanied by a wonderful cast of characters. I hope she’s at work right now on the story that lies beneath that story—not what happened and when, but what she thought and what she felt—and I hope she calls that book Tara of New York. That’s a confessional memoir I look forward to reading."

  THE CLANCYS OF QUEENS BY TARA CLANCY
  REVIEWED BY KATIE ROGIN
  October 13th, 2016

  As the daughter of a divorced Italian-American social worker from Brooklyn and an Irish-American cop from Queens, Tara Clancy had an unusual childhood in 1980s New York City. She hopscotched among her father’s converted boatshed apartment, her feisty Italian grandparents’ home, and her mom’s millionaire boyfriend’s Hamptons estate. A born storyteller, Clancy has turned her ability “ to jump social strata in a single bound” into wonderful tales as a Moth GrandSlam winner and an essayist in the New York Times, The Paris Review Daily and The Rumpus. Her new memoir, The Clancys of Queens, contains these pieces and expands on them.

  Clancy’s keen observational humor and authentic working-class New Yawkese survive the transition from stage to page as she crafts a love letter to the family that raised her.

  When I twist the mental radio-tuner dial of my memory as far back as it’ll go, I get staticky snippets of my parents and me from my earliest days, but that sweet crystal-clear reception actually first comes in on the time I spent with my grandparents. In other words, as best I can remember, life begins for me in a tiny ad hoc geriatric Italian village on 251st Street in Bellerose, Queens.

  With both my mom and dad working double-time after their divorce, starting at age three I spend the weekdays in the care of my grandma, Rosalie Riccobono, who lived, of course, with my grandpa, Bruno “Ricky” Riccobono, who in turn shared a two-family house with my great-aunt, Mary Zacchio, that just happened to be next door to the homed of two other Italian-American septuagenarian couples, Tina and Lenny Cirranci, and Anna and Joe Paradise. And though I was with my parents on weeknights and weekends, bouncing between their vastly different worlds, my most vivid early memories are born in this four-hundred-meter stretch of street, in these three abutting houses, with these seven elderly Italians.

  Clancy sketches these people with telling details and great affection. Her grandpa calls her “Shrimpy” and is “as close to Buddha as an Italian-born, Brooklyn-bred, truck-driver-turned-life-insurance-salesman has ever been.” The Carrancis’ house “was its own universe of periwinkle and crystal, with the smell of Aquanet and Chesterfields imbedded in the wall-to-wall carpeting.” The Paradises’ sunlit kitchen was “full of glowing, seventies-era, harvest-gold appliances” and a watered-down glass of orange juice always waiting for young Tara. Grandma peppers her speech with her favorite expression: fahngool. (Clancy helpfully translates: “Fahngool is the Italian American pronunciation of the slang word vaffanculo, which translates to “go do it in the ass” though it is used more like ‘fuck off.’ Either way, it’s not a nice thing to yell at a five-year-old. But Grandma means nothing by it. ‘Fuck’ is just her go-to, catchall punctuation.”) Clancy’s world expands to include her mother’s boyfriend’s Bridgehampton world of limousine rides, lazy country afternoons, and existential after-dinner conversations.

  Tara Clancy
  Tara Clancy

  People die, people marry, relatives move away. As Tara gets older, the foundation of her life shifts a bit. She focuses on classmates rather than family. She’s always been hyperactive, rule-breaking, “untethered,” but by the age of ten she is “a tried-and-true child chameleon, a real-life little Zelig who knew how to go from being a barfly at a Queens local hangout to a summertime Bridgehamptonite to an honorary septuagenarian at the drop of a dime.” This is one of the very few glimpses of Tara Clancy’s psyche that she allows us.

  As a memoir, The Clancys of Queens doesn’t exactly fit the confessional mode. It’s less about Tara Clancy and more about the people who nurtured her. It doesn’t follow the sweep of sin, sorrow, and redemption that we’ve come to expect from autobiography. That Clancy’s personal chronicle is not the bright shiny output of the memoir industrial complex is somewhat of a relief; instead we get an anthropological report of a disappearing world of white, ethnic, working-class New Yorkers, and we hear from working-class women who are often silent in literature.

  But for all the life these sketches evoke, they also have an airless quality, as if they’ve been overworked and put under glass for display. The reminiscences are almost exclusively from a child’s point of view—not someone older looking back, but a child in the moment—and this can come off as cutesy and simple-minded. I craved more context and a broader picture. There are hints of darker, more adult circumstances that may have had a deeper impact than, say, a middle school softball teammate’s dangerous slide on the asphalt, but Clancy is stingy with these larger points. Maybe the Oprah-fied memoir writers busily journaling “my story of me” have taught me to expect a specific narrative arc of certain life milestones, but I found Tara Clancy to be a bit of a tease, offering up breadcrumbs that quickly lead nowhere. There’s more stand-up comedy here than self-analysis, as if Clancy sees the tough topics coming and turns away from them. Favoring portraiture over confession, Clancy avoids the coming-of-age clichés, but she also avoids the kind of subject matter that readers might find more meaningful.

  Tara Clancy bopped from working-class Brooklyn and Queens to the moneyed Hamptons and educated Manhattan; from public schools to NYU; from falling under Shakespeare’s spell to taking the stage at the Moth—and she was accompanied by a wonderful cast of characters. I hope she’s at work right now on the story that lies beneath that story—not what happened and when, but what she thought and what she felt—and I hope she calls that book Tara of New York. That’s a confessional memoir I look forward to reading.

• Lambda Literary
  http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/10/02/the-clancys-of-queens-by-tara-clancy/
  Word count: 714

  QUOTED: "The affection for local landmarks and each borough’s quirks, improvisation to suit whatever situation life is dealing out, and a sense that even the biggest threats can ultimately be overcome all permeate this story. ... Clancy’s is not a cartoonish life, but one that’s exceptional in its realness and resilience, and tremendous in the telling."

  REVIEWS : BIO/MEMOIR : ARTICLE

  ‘The Clancys of Queens’ by Tara Clancy
  Review by Heather Seggel
  October 2, 2016

  When Tara Clancy’s parents divorced her world was not cleft in two, it was divided into three highly disparate parts. Her father’s place was a one-room converted boathouse in a down and out corner of Queens. The story opens with a young Tara scrapping with neighborhood boys while wearing her dad’s weighted boxing gloves and nearly knocking her own block off. From there she might go to her mother’s place, from which she’d be dropped off into a Brooklyn complex full of Italian grandparents and great aunts and uncles, worth reading about for the cursing alone. But every other weekend a limo would slide up and carry her to her mother’s boyfriend’s place, an estate in the Hamptons complete with a man-made lagoon. The Clancys of Queens is a family story that takes an unfiltered look at class differences. It’s also hilarious, inspiring, and that rarest of animals–a memoir full of honest good cheer.

  Clancy has told stories on The Moth Radio Hour and in other venues, and she writes with the confidence of a practiced raconteur. One of the rituals she shared with her grandmother was saving old greeting cards to eventually tear in half and use to collect floor sweepings. “The whole scene strikes me now as some tough-ass urban women’s version of elder tribal ladies teaching the wee ones to work a loom: You see, my dear grandchild, now you’re learning the age-old tradition of our people saving two bucks on a dustpan.”

  Young Tara is unfazed by the contrast in the worlds she inhabits, sliding from nights out at the local bar with her dad to late-night philosophical chats with Mark in the Hamptons. She’s a rule-breaker in school until her teens, when her natural intelligence runs headlong into the works of William Shakespeare and something clicks. It’s not long before she’s pulled a neat one-eighty from near dropout to making the dean’s list.

  It’s mentioned in her bio that Clancy “now lives in Manhattan with her wife and two sons.” Sexuality doesn’t figure into this story as a Big Deal, though it does pop up. Some of her father’s friends from the bar were gay, and her mother had one lesbian friend in college. She brings Tara to visit that friend in hopes that her daughter will figure out what she suspects is the case. This turns into a story too good to spoil here. When she’s able to come out to her mother, it’s a vindication of her suspicions; her dad has a slightly harder time accepting the news but comes around with admirable speed.

  Reading The Clancys of Queens saddled me with a wicked earworm that at first was hard to place, though it was definitely music featured in a cartoon. A Hare Grows in Manhattan is the story of Bugs Bunny’s path from working-class rabbit to stardom, and the song he sings while tap-dancing down the street in a straw boater is “The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady.” Throughout the story, Bugs is set upon by dogs who he outwits through repeated self-invention, ultimately sending them running when he holds up a copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The affection for local landmarks and each borough’s quirks, improvisation to suit whatever situation life is dealing out, and a sense that even the biggest threats can ultimately be overcome all permeate this story as well. Clancy’s is not a cartoonish life, but one that’s exceptional in its realness and resilience, and tremendous in the telling.

  - See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/10/02/the-clancys-of-queens-by-tara-clancy/#sthash.WwOurPeX.dpuf