The Arrogant Years

In the award-winning "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit", Lucette Lagnado offered a heartbreaking portrait of her father, Leon, a successful Cairo boulevardier forced to take flight with his family during the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, and of her family's struggle to rebuild a new life in a new land. "The Arrogant Years" continues Lagnado's saga, telling the story of her mother, Edith, coming of age in a magical old Cairo of dusty alleyways and grand villas inhabited by pashas and their wives. Lagnado then revisits her own early years in America-first, as a schoolgirl in Brooklyn's immigrant enclaves, where she dreams of becoming the fearless Mrs. Emma Peel of "The Avengers", and later, as an avenging reporter for some of her adopted country's most prestigious newspapers. A stranger growing up in a strange land, Lagnado reveals how her adolescence was further complicated by cancer at sixteen. The devastating consequences would rob her of her "arrogant years" - the period defined by an overwhelming sense of possibility, invincibility, and confidence. Lagnado looks to the women sequestered behind the wooden screen at her childhood synagogue, to the young coeds at Vassar and Columbia in the 1970s, to her own mother and the women of their past in Cairo, and reflects on their stories as she struggles to make sense of her own choices.