Tama Janowitz

Tama Janowitz

Tama Janowitz (born April 12, 1957 San Francisco, California) is an American novelist and a short story writer.^[1] She is often referenced as one of the main "brat pack" authors, along with Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Lindquist and Jay McInerney.^[2]

Life

Her parents, a psychiatrist father, Julian Janowitz, and literature professor (Cornell University) mother, Phyllis Janowitz, divorced when she was ten. She and her brother David grew up with her mother in Massachusetts.^[3] and for two years in the late 1960s, in Israel.^[4]

She graduated from Barnard College with a B.A. in 1977, and from Hollins College with a M.A. in 1979.^[5]

She studied at the Columbia University School of the Arts and started writing about life in New York City, where she had settled down. She socialized with Andy Warhol^[6] and became well known in New York's literary and social circles. Her 1986 collection of short stories, Slaves of New York brought her wider fame.^[6] Slaves of New York was adapted into a 1989 film directed by James Ivory and starring Bernadette Peters. Janowitz wrote the screenplay and also appeared, playing Peters' friend.

Janowitz has been an icon of literary success to at least one generation of writers. She has published seven novels, one collection of stories and one work of non-fiction. She left Manhattan to live in Brooklyn with her British husband and art-gallery owner, Tim Hunt,^[7][8] and their daughter.^[9] She now lives near Ithaca, New York.^[10]

Her memoir, Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction, was published in August 2016 to widespread interest and reviews both positive and negative. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Ada Calhoun noted Janowitz's deadpan, almost careless way of looking at her own life and the glamor of hanging out with Andy Warhol and dancing at Studio 54. The review also addressed the concern with material goods and financial security that drives many of Janowitz's novels and led her to appear in ads for Amaretto and other products. Wrote Calhoun, "This memoir — which spans her childhood (partly spent in 1968 Israel, where her family was booted from a hotel for not paying), her adventuresome youth (she had a fling with a 63-year-old Lawrence Durrell when she was 19), her career struggles and successes, and her more recent life as caretaker to her dying mother — shows that she comes by her obsession with money honestly."^[11]

In her fifties, Janowitz discovered a love of horseback riding, as described in her memoir.

Awards

• 1975 Bread Loaf Writers fellowship
• 1976; 1977 Janoway Fiction prize
• 1982 National Endowment award ^[12]

Fiction

• American Dad, Crown, 1981, ISBN 978-0-517-56573-5; Picador, 1988, ISBN 9780330302678
• Slaves of New York, Crown Publishers, 1986, ISBN 978-0-517-56107-2
• A Cannibal in Manhattan, Washington Square Press, July 1988, ISBN 978-0-671-66598-2
• The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group, Crown Publishers, 1992, ISBN 978-0-517-58698-3; Simon and Schuster, 1994, ISBN 978-0-671-87150-5
• By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee Crown Publishers, 1996, ISBN 978-0-517-70298-7
• A Certain Age, Doubleday, 1999; Anchor Books, 2000, ISBN 978-0-385-49611-7
• Hear that?, Illustrator Tracy Dockray, SeaStar Books, 2001, ISBN 978-1-58717-074-4
• Peyton Amberg, Bloomsbury, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7475-6138-5; Macmillan, 2004, ISBN 978-0-312-31845-1
• They Is Us, The Friday Project Limited, 2008, ISBN 9781906321123

Nonfiction

• Janowitz, Tama (November 12, 2007). "The Real Thing". The New York Times. 
• Area Code 212, Bloomsbury, 2002, ISBN 978-0-7475-5828-6; Macmillan, 2005, ISBN 978-0-312-32063-8
• Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction; Dey Street Books, 9 August 2016 (ISBN 978-0062391322)^[13]

References

External links

• "My Lunch with Tama", Random House Bold Type, 08 1999, Laura L. Buchwald
• "She'll Take Manhattan", New York Magazine, July 14, 1986
• Audio Interview with Tama Janowitz
• "My Little Pony: A Memoir by Tama Janowitz