The Clancys of Queens

July 25, 2016
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, antique-collecting Hamptons businessmen, and the Irish-American cops of New York City.

A sentimental journey through the author's childhood.Recollections of childhood are often gauzy half-remembrances that yield to selective memory. However, many authors are able to remain objective in their search through the past. In her debut book, writer and performer Clancy provides an impartial account of her life growing up in the outer reaches of Queens, but by stringing together a series of vignettes and remembrances rather than a thematically driven narrative, the recollections read more like an extended monologue. Growing up in an apartment with her mother in Bellerose, Queens, Clancy spent every other weekend at her police officer father's cramped Broad Channel home and other weekends at the Hamptons estate of her mother's boyfriend. Unfortunately, the novelty of these juxtapositions is short-lived. Skipping around in years, the author tells the story of her parents, the peculiarities of her grandparents, and the questionable decisions of her adolescence, which included smoking cigarettes and marijuana and regularly drinking while at school. In addition to her tales of adolescence, Clancy broaches the subject of her burgeoning homosexuality, chronicling a trip she and her mother took to visit her mother's lesbian friend in Los Angeles. It was not until she was 19 that Clancy had her first girlfriend and came out to her parents. (Mom was fine. Dad, reluctantly accepted: "Ah, screw it. At least now we have two things in common--whiskey and women!") Though Clancy's story will strike a nerve with a particular strand of Gen Y who experienced the rap and grunge waves as high schoolers in the 1990s, there is not enough charm in the narrative to overcome the lack of focus and cohesion throughout her reflections. At times funny and touching, Clancy's recollections from her childhood are otherwise all too familiar in their mundanity. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 15, 2016

Clancy is a Moth GrandSlam winner who's been featured on NPR's Snap Judgment and this year's season finale of Girls and whose writing has appeared widely. Here she tells the story of her rough-and-tumble Queens, NY, upbringing, giving raucous, vibrant, shout-out-loud voice to urban working-class women. Then there are the Hamptons interludes facilitated by her mother's boyfriend.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2016
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)