Contemporary Authors

• You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession William Morrow (New York, NY), 2018

1. You all grow up and leave me : a memoir of teenage obsession LCCN 2018011252 Type of material Book Personal name Weiss, Piper, 1978- author. Main title You all grow up and leave me : a memoir of teenage obsession / Piper Weiss. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2018. Projected pub date 1804 Description 1 online resource. ISBN 9780062456595 (E-Book) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. You all grow up and leave me : a memoir of teenage obsession LCCN 2017025491 Type of material Book Personal name Weiss, Piper, 1978- author. Main title You all grow up and leave me : a memoir of teenage obsession / Piper Weiss. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2018. Projected pub date 1804 Description pages cm ISBN 9780062456571 (hardcover) 9780062456588 (pbk.) Item not available at the Library. Why not?

• Piper Weiss - http://www.piperweiss.com/about_main/

  About
  Piper Weiss is the author of two books. The photo anthology, My Mom, Style Icon and the forthcoming memoir, You All Grow Up and Leave Me.

  She has served as an editor at Yahoo and the New York Daily News and as Editorial Director at HelloGiggles. She is currently the Editor-In-Chief/Chief Content Officer at Levo.

  She appeared in the Independent Spirit Award-winning film, Without.

  She recently wrote this for Hazlitt.

  Her memoir will be released by William Morrow on April 10, 2018.

• Los Angeles Times - http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-piper-weiss-20180518-htmlstory.html

  Exploring the complex relationships with teen athletes and coaches with Piper Weiss and Ivy Pochoda
  By IVY POCHODA
  MAY 18, 2018 | 9:00 AM
  | NEW YORK

  Exploring the complex relationships with teen athletes and coaches with Piper Weiss and Ivy Pochoda
  Piper Weiss talks about her memoir 'You All Grow Up and Leave Me' with author Ivy Pochoda. Both were student athletes. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

  There's a picture that has been on a bookshelf in my childhood bedroom since 1991. In it, I am 14. I've just won the U.S. National 14 and under squash championships. To one side is my opponent, who is holding her runner-up trophy like you might hold a dead fish — distant and disdainful. Next to her is the tournament director. On my other side is my coach — let's call him Mike, who had through some combination of tactics and affection guided me around my galloping nerves to victory.

  A few months later, I found myself standing on the threshold of Mike's tiny studio apartment. Part of me wanted nothing more than to be invited in; the other refused to cross that doorstep. From where I stood, I could see the fold-out couch that doubled as a bed. The sheets were maroon and messy, very messy. Within a few months, Mike and I would start bickering, more like a couple than a student and a teacher. I was heartbroken. The next fall, he left my club for a different job, and I got a new coach, an older one. I stopped thinking about Mike, but never about his apartment and what I saw — the visceral, sexual side of my coach that needed to be kept secret from me for us to continue to work together in the pressured intimacy of the player-coach relationship.

  The strange and almost dangerous familiarity that develops between female players and their coaches is a Pandora's box that I must leave firmly shut if I want to continue to cherish the beauty and joy of my childhood (and later professional) sport. Lucky for me, in her brilliant debut memoir, "You All Grow Up and Leave Me" (William Morrow: 352 pp., $25.99), Piper Weiss was willing to take an ax to this box, splintering it into a thousand pieces and letting all the anxieties, discomforts, crises, frustrations and heartbreaks torpedo out.

  I meet Piper in her garden apartment in Brooklyn Heights, which is a five-minute walk from Mike's former studio and smack dab in the middle of the neighborhood where my junior squash rivals lived — in other words, a perfect place for us to dive back into the sports that dominated our adolescence. Diminutive in stature and wearing somewhat dramatic daytime makeup and the sort of short floral dress I still associate with the cool kids circa 1992, Weiss doesn't immediately look like a product of the clubby, chauffeured elite Manhattan environment that she describes. She has written one of the most accurate and visceral portraits of the fraught emotional world of teenage sports (and teenage girls in general) — not to mention a pitch-perfect memoir of the narrow-slice life on New York's Upper East Side.

  :: See Piper Weiss at The Last Bookstore Mon. May 21 at 7:30 p.m. with author Jennifer Romolini. ::

  Piper and I have a lot in common — we are almost exactly the same age and we both grew up in the wonderfully uninhibited New York City of the early ’90s, where it was not unusual for 14- and 15-year-olds to find their way into bars and nightclubs. We both went to private schools, mine in Brooklyn and hers on Manhattan's uber-tony East End Avenue, and we both played racket sports. Whereas my story followed the more conventional pattern of a competitive junior athlete, Piper's took a darker and more devastating turn. When she was 13, her beloved coach, Gary Wilensky, a mash-up of Pee-wee Herman and Nick Bollettieri, killed himself after he botched the kidnapping of one of his star pupils. News of Wilensky's suicide was aired nationally on the show “Hard Copy” at the same time it was revealed that he had created a literal cabin of horrors equipped with handcuffs, S&M gear, chains, pulleys, sex dolls, nightgowns, sanitary napkins and wine coolers should his kidnap attempt have gone off without a hitch.

  "You All Grow Up and Leave Me" by Piper Weiss
  "You All Grow Up and Leave Me" by Piper Weiss William Morrow
  Out of this disaster, Weiss has crafted a book that marries true crime to memoir, plunging deep into the angry, messy heart of a teenage girl while exploring the horrifying — and eventually deadly — loneliness of an eternal outsider. In a more conventional book, Weiss would have stuck to the commonplace tenets of true crime reporting — the gruesome details, the investigation, interviews with fellow students and their parents. Instead, Weiss mines her memory of her early teens to excavate something darker and more personal: her feelings of disappointment that Wilensky didn't choose her as his intended victim and her questionable compulsion to defend him shortly after his death. It’s a startling take, and Weiss finds the answer for her action and reaction not in the sport of tennis or the confusing charisma of Wilensky, who often wore tutus and roller-skated on court and sent his students mixtapes and handmade Valentines, but in the heartsick and sometimes obsessive nature of teenage girls and their dangerously complex friendships.

  "There was this inherent competition between all of us," Weiss says, as her cat runs figure eights across her ankles. "And with competition, you never fully trust the other person. It wasn't just tennis, but something in general with my experience with girls at that time. We were always comparing ourselves to each other in order to understand who we were. So we were always competing with one another, because inherently, it made us feel better or worse.”

  Authors from David Foster Wallace to Megan Abbott have shown that sports provides the perfect microcosm for exploring and exploding real world anxieties from the personal to the global. Weiss uses tennis is a springboard to plunge into the neuroses and conflicts of her early teenage years — feelings of inferiority both in terms of appearance and ability. But sports also allows her to examine something inherent to teenage girls in particular, at least in my fairly clear memory of being that age — an overwhelming need to be liked, to be anointed, to be chosen.

  "In sports," Weiss says, "you see your competitors as numbers. She's two. I'm three and so on. You are constantly measuring yourself. She has a good forehand. My backhand is weaker. But also, she's prettier, her breasts are smaller. I have this. You have that. The problem is you haven't defined who you are yet, and you can't look at another person as just a person. You're just like, ‘What does it mean to be me and who I am?’"

  Piper Weiss
  Piper Weiss with her cat, Wonton, at home in Brooklyn. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times
  Coming into herself, figuring out who she was amid the misleading perfection of her classmates is the struggle at the center of Weiss' book. How does a short Jewish girl obsessed with Jim Morrison find her place in a world where blond, Hermès-swaddled superiority is the norm? In her estimation, Weiss was a perennial also-ran — not a loser, but not a card-carrying member of the in crowd — which conjured an endless longing for the right kind of friendships, attention from the right kind of boys, the right kind of body and for knowing the right way to behave.

  This adolescent insecurity, this need to compare and to shine, is the precise tempest in which a manipulative coach like Wilensky thrived, giving his pupils what their friends (and even families) would not. Wilensky understood that more than instruction or improvement, his students — or “Gary's Girls,” as they were called — wanted a single thing — to be liked.

  "I would be interested to see if boys back then had the same feeling as girls did," Weiss says. "We were taught that were weren't as strong as boys, and if we wanted to win at something, we had to use different tactics. And one of them was always the importance of being liked for whatever reason. At 13 or 14, you're not thinking that this should be physically or sexually, you’re just thinking that ‘I want to be liked, and then I'll have a foot in the door.’"

  Wilensky liked his girls — his attempt to kidnap one led to his downfall. In some sports, certain activities open the door for an uncomfortable intimacy among adults and teens — long car rides, private dinners, late-night tutorials, events that set the stage for incremental transgressions but that could also be innocuous. In the insular bubble of Weiss' Upper East Side, where parents' blind faith in the safety of their inner circle, especially where a beloved and well-vetted coach was concerned, it was not unheard of for these types of transgressions to be overlooked, ignored, even encouraged — anything so that a superstar, or attractive college applicant, might emerge.

  But here's the problem — the more of these moments that take place, the more difficult it becomes for a coach to conceal the very thing that needs to be concealed from his pupils, the reality of his adult life. Eventually, something will slip through the cracks, a post-coital bed, for instance, or a glimmer of a deep, dark disturbance. But even when Weiss glimpses a nefarious side to Wilensky, when he loses his temper with her training partner in inexplicable fashion, she still longs for a unique and personal connection to her coach. And it finally happens, right before the disastrous events that led to Wilensky's death, when alone in a car, in the evening after practice, he tells Weiss, "I'm depressed."

  Instead of hearing alarm bells, Weiss, who had her own mental-health struggles at the time, finds something else — connection. She doesn't hear Wilensky's cry for help as much as she rejoices in finding a kindred spirit and relishes the fact that he considers her a worthy confidant. And this is where Weiss shines as a memoirist — seamlessly unveiling the unexpected and the startling, revealing the raw, ragged truth about her conflicted and slightly twisted teenage self.

  Her joy is short-lived, of course. Because, although Wilensky confided in her, he did not ultimately choose Weiss. She was not his superstar, the object of his horrifying affection, a fact that burrowed so deep into Weiss she had to write a book about it to make peace with it and with herself as a teenager.

  Pochoda is the author most recently of the novel “Wonder Valley.” She was a four-time all-American squash player.

Print Marked Items
You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage
Obsession
Michael Cart
Booklist.
114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p12+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text: 
You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession. By Piper Weiss. Apr. 2018. 352p. Morrow, $25.99 (9780062456571); e-book,
$12.99 (9780062456595). 810.
In a combination of memoir and true crime, Weiss evokes her early 1990s teenage years and her involvement with a private tennis coach named
Gary Wilensky. A child of privilege who lived on Park Avenue in New York, Weiss was part of a coterie of wealthy prepubescent and pubescent
girls who were Wilensky's students. Well known in New York tennis circles, Wilensky was popular with his students, who called themselves
"Gary's Girls." Little did they know that he was a secret stalker obsessed with his students, one in particular whom he attempted, fecklessly, to
kidnap. Failing, he committed suicide. The case was a sensation in 1993 but is now largely forgotten except by Weiss, who proves to have
something of an obsession of her own with the case. Her story is divided between the early nineties and the near present. The true-crime part of
her book is significantly more interesting than her report of her own unexceptional life as a well-to-do teen. As a result, this one is strictly for
true-crime fans.--Michael Cart
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cart, Michael. "You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 12+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771746/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6fc51874. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771746
What Were READING: Our roundup of the must-reads
hitting our bookshelves this month
Samantha Irby
Marie Claire.
25.4 (Apr. 2018): p111.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Hearst Communications. Reprinted with permission of Hearst.
http://www.hearst.com
Full Text: 
1. YOU THINK IT, I'LL SAY IT
by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)
Short stories can be a gamble, but Sittenfeld has this brilliant way of creating characters that are authentic and relatable. This collection of
sometimes painfully honest observations covers a lot of emotional ground (attempted infidelity, high school rivalries, the tricky politics of casual
sex), and each of them is captivating and fresh.
2. THE ELIZAS
by Sara Shepard (Atria Books)
In this new adult offering from the author of Pretty Little Liars, our seemingly unreliable narrator, Eliza, a novelist, wakes up in the hospital after
what she swears was an attack on her life. Her family believes it is yet another failed suicide attempt. Spoiler: It's a dark and twisty mystery that
will keep you guessing until the very end.
3. THE GIRL WHO NEVER READ NOAM CHOMSKY by Jana Casale (Knopf)
Ever pretend to be into some pretentious thing to try to get some random cutie to like you? Right. Leda decides to read Noam Chomsky after a
conversation with a boy in a cafe, and what follows is a series of charming and funny vignettes chronicling the life of a woman figuring out who
she is and what she wants.
4. THE RECOVERING: INTOXICATION AND ITS AFTERMATH by Leslie Jamison (Little, Brown and Company)
The Empathy Exams best-selling author turns her keen eye on substance dependence and sobriety. She scaffolds her own journey, traversing the
lonely terrain of addiction, as well as the recovery movement at large. Read it for her unsparing honesty and sharp insights, and revel in it for her
inimitable, yes, empathy.
5. YOU ALL GROW UP AND LEAVE ME by Piper Weiss (William Morrow)
Equal parts true-crime investigation and self-reflection, Weiss' memoir revisits her childhood relationship with her middle-aged tennis coach who,
unbeknownst to her, was a terrifying child predator. Bracingly honest and extremely discomfiting, this book is like a riveting episode of Law &
Order: SVU set at a Manhattan prep school with the U.S. Open as a backdrop.
6. AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART
by Elaine Castillo (Viking)
This debut novel is a lively, often hilarious family epic stretching from the villages of the Philippines to Northern California. Our heroine is Hero,
disowned by her parents and sent to live with her uncle in the Bay Area, in search of an American Dream not always available to those who seek
it. A fierce, deeply affecting story of immigrant life in America.
By SAMANTHA IRBY
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Irby, Samantha. "What Were READING: Our roundup of the must-reads hitting our bookshelves this month." Marie Claire, Apr. 2018, p. 111.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536315939/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3f2a5da0. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536315939
Weiss, Piper: YOU ALL GROW UP AND LEAVE ME
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Weiss, Piper YOU ALL GROW UP AND LEAVE ME Morrow/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $25.99 4, 10 ISBN: 978-0-06-245657-1
A woman who grew up under the tutelage of a predatory child molester shares her story.
As a youth in Manhattan, Weiss (My Mom, Style Icon, 2011) was a tennis hopeful at "one of the top private schools in the country." Her memoir,
a lyrically crafted yet unsettling affair, opens on a bus, with she and her classmates on their way to tennis lessons. She learned about Gary
Wilensky, an in-demand private coach who became popular with many other girls at the school. The book's framework is culled from police
reports, articles, interviews, personal field research, and Wilensky's own words, transcribed from documents. Through this dogged research,
Weiss charts Wilensky's early life and his sketchy employment history and then moves into his private life, which became increasingly disturbing
and sinister, ultimately revealing the shrouded world of a sexual obsessive who preyed on vulnerable, unassuming young girls. Running alongside
this narrative is the story of the author's privileged upbringing and adolescent experiences, which paint a multitonal portrait of a girl in flux with
schoolwork, insecurities, desires to succeed and discover herself, all while blissfully unaware of the predatory deviant lurking beneath the facade
of a goofy middle-aged tennis coach who was cool with all the kids. By the time the author had her first tennis lessons with "Grandpa Gary" in
the early 1990s, he had already amassed a group of favorite girls to whom he'd send valentines and divulge intimate secrets. Wilensky also began
fully furnishing a remote cabin hideaway with bondage and torture equipment and surveillance technology. Was Weiss his next victim? No one
will ever know; Wilensky killed himself after the failed kidnapping attempt of a mother and daughter he'd been stalking. Weiss has crafted a dark
and brooding yet brisk and eloquently written memoir, and her vivid coming-of-age narration shines a spotlight on the precarious relationship
between teenagers and adults and everything that can go awry in between.
A bristling, harrowing journey into the life of a stalker and his unsuspecting victims.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Weiss, Piper: YOU ALL GROW UP AND LEAVE ME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247899/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a90887ef. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527247899

Cart, Michael. "You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 12+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771746/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 2 July 2018. Irby, Samantha. "What Were READING: Our roundup of the must-reads hitting our bookshelves this month." Marie Claire, Apr. 2018, p. 111. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536315939/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 2 July 2018. "Weiss, Piper: YOU ALL GROW UP AND LEAVE ME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247899/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 2 July 2018.

• Vanity Fair
  https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/04/you-all-grow-up-and-leave-me-piper-weiss-interview
  Word count: 1089

  An Attempted Kidnapping, an Elite Manhattan Prep School, and the Evocative New Memoir That Connects Them
  Piper Weiss’s You All Grow Up and Leave Me retells the story of tennis coach Gary Wilensky, and the impact of his crime on the girls who saw him as a mentor.
  by JANE BORDEN
  APRIL 9, 2018 10:34 AM

  Left, courtesy of HarperCollins; right, by Jessica Dimmock.
  When tennis player Jennifer Capriati went pro in 1990 at the age of 13, she was described in People magazine as “downright dangerous” on the court. “That is how you have to be if you’re a teenage girl with a racket,” writes Piper Weiss in her gorgeous, moody, and evocative memoir You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession, published this week.

  Weiss was a student at Manhattan’s Chapin prep school during Capriati’s rise, playing tennis and taking private lessons from Gary Wilensky, a popular girls’ coach on the prep-school circuit. In 1993, Wilensky attacked one of his students, whom he believed he loved. When the kidnapping attempt failed, he killed himself, inadvertently leading police to the secluded “cabin of horrors,” as news reports described it, where he’d planned to take the girl.

  At the time Weiss was shielded from the extent of Wilensky’s crime, and she felt empathy for him; she even wondered why she hadn’t been his favorite. Then, about a decade ago, she found a folder of clippings her mother had kept, and became consumed by the story. Her book is half coming-of-age story and half exhaustively researched true crime. The subtitle references both Wilensky’s fixation on his student (whom the author refers to only as “the daughter”), and the author’s consuming preoccupation with the man and his crime. Tying all of it together is a relentless sense of encroaching danger— the menace of pre-Giuliani Manhattan, the instability of adolescence, the violent fantasies brewing in Weiss’s own teenage mind—and efforts made to insulate, many of which ironically offer people like Wilensky a way in.

  Even before Wilensky’s story became national news, Weiss and her classmates were accustomed to reporters hanging around Chapin. Ivanka Trump was a student there when the Marla Maples story broke. Alumnae include Jackie Kennedy, Queen Noor of Jordan, a Rockefeller, an Eisenhower, a Roosevelt. In a phone interview, Weiss recalls students being delivered to and from school in armored vehicles because, the rumor went, their parents feared ransom kidnappings.

  Weiss was uncomfortable in this world, and felt she was being groomed for something she could not be. Her parents grew up in Queens. Her grandparents, on both sides, were Jews who came to America on boats, as stowaways, fleeing persecution. When she dressed for school, she swapped the Jewish star on her necklace for a Tiffany lima bean.

  Watch Now: Jada Pinkett Smith Breaks Down Her Career, from “True Colors” to “Girl's Trip”

  Her descriptions of privilege in the book are complicated; when reporters comes to the schools Wilenksy’s students attended, there was an unspoken rule not to speak to the press. “Ours is the world others want to expose, and it must be closely guarded,” she writes. “It’s tacky to reveal yourself as eager for attention. More than that, it’s a betrayal. A secret tattled.“ Break the trust of privilege, and “the codes are changed, the gates are locked, and the traitor is left outside without protection.”

  Weiss deftly evokes the era of the Central Park jogger, when the city suffered a crack epidemic and record homicide rates. Muggings, hissing men, figures lurking behind windows: every time she leaves her parents’ Upper East Side apartment, the prose grows tense.

  “I wanted there always to be this feeling that you were threatened and vulnerable as a young girl, no matter where you were,” she says. “And there was mixed messaging, like, look a certain way, but at the same time, be street-smart. Don’t advertise it. But also make sure you advertise it to the right people and in the right way. Get male approval. But not too much male approval.”

  Weiss contacted several of the girls, now adults, whom Wilensky coached. One of them recalled an evening, after he dropped her off at home, as she was getting out of his car, when he said, “You’re turning into a beautiful woman.” She was 12 at the time and felt flattered. “That was our training,” Weiss adds.

  At the same time, Weiss and some of her classmates took self-defense courses, which she describes, in retrospect, as “slapstick comedy.” They were cosseted to the point of vulnerability. Was she truly as fearful, as a child, as the book suggests? “That year, always. Everything felt like a trap. Part of why I connected with [Gary’s] story so much is that I couldn’t tell if the danger was outside of me or coming from within.”

  As the true-crime genre goes, Weiss’s retelling is respectful, eschewing sensationalism for self investigation, insightful metaphor, and lyrical turns of phrase. She and her classmates were told that Wilensky just “snapped,” she says. “As a teenager, I thought I was a monster. I had the desire to hurt people. I figured that I would blow before I would graduate. Either that or I would kill myself.” Instead, Weiss discovered that Wilensky did not at all “snap.” She found a history of violence, dating all the way back to his high-school years.

  Shortly after Weiss finished the book, the #MeToo movement exploded. “It resonated with me,“ she says, “because what I realized in writing the story is that I felt unheard at the time.” You All Grow Up and Leave Me arrives a few months after dozens of gymnasts testified in court against Larry Nassar, the team doctor convicted on ten counts of child sexual molestation. “They were covered on an international scale,” Weiss says of the young women who testified. “People watched their entire testimony. They addressed the confusing aspects of being groomed by a predator, how it’s not always clear, and how other people are complicit. It took these brave young women speaking out for people to really pay attention and understand, to address the question we’ve been asking for so long: ‘how could this happen?’ It’s like, maybe ask some girls—they know.”

• Chronogram
  https://www.chronogram.com/hudsonvalley/you-all-grow-up-and-leave-me-by-piper-weiss-book-review/Content?oid=5286743
  Word count: 656

  Save
  Favorite
  Email
  You All Grow Up and Leave Me by Piper Weiss | Book Review
  By James Conrad
  click to enlarge
  you-all-grow-up-and-leave-me_piper-weiss-.jpg
  Perhaps the first hurdle for an author writing a memoir is sorting out whose story is whose. "I have a story, but it didn't happen to me," Piper Weiss complains to an old college boyfriend early in You All Grow Up and Leave Me. The book is a riveting account of an adolescence that was marred by a relationship with her tennis coach, Gary Wilensky, who later assaulted and attempted to kidnap another young student referred to by Weiss as "the Daughter." But "marred" is the wrong word, as the author struggles with the complexities of her relationship with Wilensky, and what he represented to her before it all literally turned into a real-life house of horrors that landed on the front pages of newspapers and magazines—all saved by Weiss's mother in an actual file. Is Weiss writing Wilenky's story? The Daughter's? If it seems that by riding shotgun in Wilensky's car all those times to and from tennis practices, the more interesting worldview became Weiss's own, a front-row seat to the dark streets Wilensky travels down, but with an ear tuned to the chatter of the young girls in the back.

  Although the true crimes and potential crimes of Wilensky are the inciting incidents for Weiss's story, these tabloid headlines are a small part of the whole, a compelling coming-of-age story in the halls of private schools on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where Weiss feels too short, too Jewish, not pretty enough, not smart enough, and, ultimately, possibly not one of Wilensky's "favorites." It is also an accounting of all the relationships outside of Wilensky: the girls she tries to fit in with, the boys she meets at parties, and, most significantly, her own family, mainly Weiss's mother, who is perhaps the unexpected heroine of her teenage battles.

  The story of an adolescent girl being at odds with her mother may not sound like a plot line you have never read before, but in Weiss' hands, the complexity of their interactions offers a guide to raising an artistic, headstrong daughter while at the same time shedding light on being that very black sheep of a girl storming through her teenage years. Weiss does her homework by providing background of her mother's mother in order to better understand their differences. And there are very big scenes with Weiss and her mother, from being interviewed by reporters about Wilensky, to a very violent encounter between the two of them over the whereabouts of a Banana Republic sweater. But Weiss is a poet of small details, neatly summing up their intimacy in one simple gesture, when Weiss enters the kitchen and takes her mother's can of diet soda, and her mother wordlessly rises and gets herself another.

  Getting back to Wilensky, as Weiss relentlessly continues to do, we learn that violent crime has no room for metaphor. Weiss herself, upon being turned down by the Daughter for an interview for the book, is smart to recognize her own privilege of not being the object of the actual violence. But still: "I loved him," she tells a reporter. And as her mother explains to her, incredibly, "He came at a time in your life when you needed him." Ultimately, it's the old college boyfriend who sets her on course for the book, saying "Piper, this is your story. Don't forget that." But what Weiss discovers in the conflicted metaphor of developing her own adolescent sexuality in the company of a sexual sociopath is that sometimes not being the "favorite" can provide its own singular perspective. Sometimes it can even save your life.

  Piper Weiss reads and signs at The Golden Notebook in Woodstock on July 14 at 6 pm.

• Brooklyn Daily Eagle
  http://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/2018/4/6/new-memoir-explores-psychological-manipulation-child-predators
  Word count: 571

  New memoir explores psychological manipulation of child predators
  Piper Weiss. Photos courtesy of Harper Collins
  Piper Weiss. Photos courtesy of Harper Collins

  Brooklyn Daily Eagle
  In the early 1990s, a shocking scandal shook Manhattan’s Upper East Side when a highly-sought tennis coach was discovered to be a child predator. In her new memoir “You All Grow Up and Leave Me,” which will be released on April 10, author and witness Piper Weiss examines the event as both a teenage eyewitness and a dispassionate investigative reporter. An unsettling blend of true crime and coming-of-age memoir, Piper offers a thoughtful mediation on adolescent obsession and the vulnerability of youth.

  Weiss was 14 years old when her middle-aged tennis coach, Gary Wilensky, one of New York City’s most prestigious private instructors, killed himself after a failed attempt to kidnap one of his teenage students. In the aftermath, authorities discovered that this well-known figure among the Upper East Side tennis crowd was actually a frightening child predator, who had built a secret torture chamber — a “cabin of horrors” — in his secluded rental in the Adirondacks.

  Before the scandal broke, Piper had been thrilled to be one of “Gary’s Girls.” “Grandpa Gary,” as he was known among his students, was different than other adults. He treated Piper like a grownup, taking her to dinners, engaging in long intimate conversations and sending her special valentines. As reporters swarmed her private community in the wake of Wilensky’s death, Piper learned that her mentor was a predator with a sordid history of child stalking and sexual fetishes. But why did she still feel protective of Wilensky, and why was she disappointed that he hadn’t chosen her?

  Now, 20 years later, Piper investigates the case hoping to understand and exorcise the childhood memories that haunt her to this day. Combining research, interviews and personal records, “You All Grow Up and Leave Me” explores the psychological manipulation of child predators — their ability to charm their way into seemingly protected worlds — and the far-reaching effects their actions have on those who trust them most.

  The memoir has important real-world implications. In the 20 years since the traumatic event that defined Piper’s childhood, we have seen a proliferation of cases featuring abusive authority figures. “You All Grow Up and Leave Me” examines one such predator, the man who so insidiously and thoroughly infiltrated Piper’s world; and she is fearless in her exploration, revealing the thought-provoking parallels between her own naive obsessions and his distorted fixations, all while showing us exactly what it feels like to be a teenager standing on the sidelines as the truth is revealed.

  With successes like “Serial” and “Making a Murderer,” the public appetite for true crime stories is stronger than ever — and Piper’s eerily evocative style perfectly captures the interior world and intense vulnerability of the American teenager, making the overall read as darkly compelling as today’s most popular psychological suspense.

  Weiss, a Brooklyn resident, has served as editorial director for HelloGiggles, and as features editor for the New York Daily News and Yahoo, where her original reporting earned international news coverage. She is the author of the book “My Mom, Style Icon,” and her writing has appeared in publications including Glamour, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Elle.com, Refinery29, New York magazine and Hazlitt.

Word Count