THE DRAW

Hoping to make a killing in New Jersey real estate, the author’s father, Monroe Siegel, takes a draw from his employer against unearned commission. When the recession hits in the 1970s, Monroe finds himself owing a small fortune to his firm. He sinks toward divorce and bankruptcy, while Lola, Lee's mother, suffers a nervous breakdown that turns her into a different person.

For decades, Siegel led a double life: a fixture on the East Coast literary scene, part of its intellectual establishment, he was at the same time heavily in debt, with a zero credit rating and no assets to his name. On the rare occasions when he would have been able to pay his taxes, he didn’t anyway and instead invested in his art. A young boy’s awakening to the conflict between innate gifts and social class is at the center of this searing memoir about the unforgiving sovereignty of money. LEE SIEGEL is a leading culturarl critic. He has been a senior editor and TV critic at the New Republic, book critic for the Nation, art critic for Slate, staff writer at Harper’s, Talk magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, weekly columnist for the New York Observer, weekly columnist for the Daily Beast, and associate editor of ARTnews. His writing has been published by every major magazine and newspaper in the country, including the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine; the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Section; the New Yorker; the Atlantic Monthly; the New York Review of Books; and New York magazine. In 2002, Siegel received the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. In 2011, he served as a judge for PEN’s John Galbraith Prize. To date, Siegel has published five books, including, most recently, a short, critical biography of Groucho Marx for Yale University Press’s acclaimed “Jewish Lives” series.