“Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind”
Anne Roiphe
Seven Stories Press, $23.95

When I read books for a review, I often put a check mark in the margin of text that I find smart or funny or well written or otherwise of interest or merit. Suffice it to say that my copy of “Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind,” Anne Roiphe’s latest novel, is littered with check marks.

It is a quintessentially New York novel (and shameless urban chauvinist that I am, I really mean a Manhattan novel in much the same way that Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” was a Manhattan movie). It is Jewish, intellectual, Upper West Side, arty, upper middle class, Hamptons-y, and deeply concerned with psychoanalysis.

Dr. Estelle Berman lives alone with her cat, Lily, in a huge old apartment on the Upper West Side. She is an M.D., a prominent psychoanalyst, head of committees, deliverer of psychoanalytic papers at professional meetings, supervisor to young analysts at her institute. She is a widow with a grown son. And she is beginning to lose her memory.

For a psychoanalyst, a loss of memory is not just a personal horror, but a professional death knell. Remembering particulars and minutia about the lives of one’s patients, knowing the names of their cast of characters (parents, children, pets, friends, bosses), recalling important events in their life stories, these are the things that allow a psychoanalyst to do her job. Dr. Berman tries to continue her work, but patients, colleagues, and supervisees begin to take notice of her increasingly glaring lapses.

“Dr. Berman referred Adrienne [her patient] to the best OBGYN doctor at her hospital. It started right then. Dr. Estelle Berman kept forgetting the name of the OBGYN. She thought the name was repressed because she was jealous that her own time for procreation was long gone. She thought it was a sign of how difficult it was to accept the aging body and the narrowing of the road. But it rapidly became more than that and the list of forgotten places, dates, names, directions, affiliations, faces became longer and longer. In the privacy of her bedroom, she knew what was happening, but as soon as she knew she ignored what she knew. It must not, it could not, and it should not be. In her kitchen in the Hamptons, the housekeeper tipped over the sugar bowl on the counter and Dr. Berman entered to see a swarm of ants in the sugar, black spots on pure white, and she knew what was happening in her brain, but she would tell no one.”

The book centers not just on Estelle Berman, but on the life stories of several patients, both hers and those of Dr. Z. and Dr. H., who are a kind of Greek chorus and observe Dr. Berman’s decline and her foibles in italicized dialogue at the ends of chapters.

Dr. Z. said to Dr. H., Did you see the necklace Estelle was wearing tonight? . . . It looked like diamonds and emeralds and quite extraordinary.

Dr. H. said, Real?

Dr. Z. said, Probably not. Who would wear such a thing to a discussion of “Femininity and Fantasy in the Silent Film.”

There is a strong parallel between fiction and psychoanalysis. Both — if done adroitly — are concerned with narrative, with gradually fleshing out and organizing, and not only making a life story emergent, but also making sense of a story. Ms. Roiphe has a masterful touch with both story and psychoanalytic thinking. Her portrayal of analytic sessions, the internal musings of analysts (we view sessions with Estelle and Drs. H. and Z.) and their patients, is wise, insightful, and knowledgeable.

Unlike some fictional portrayals of psychotherapy/psychoanalysis (e.g., “In Treatment” or “The Sopranos”) where I often cringe and think, “Wow, I would never say that to a patient,” Ms. Roiphe really gets and illustrates precisely what and how things are done in a good therapy. She is acutely aware of the stately pace of most of the work: “It would take a long time and multiple gentle hints before Mike Wilson might see this himself, but Dr. H. would try in time, because he believed it was true and truth was the antibiotic of the mind.”

Dr. Berman’s young supervisee thinks about the sexuality of one of his patients, “He wasn’t allowed to just tell her that. He would have to wait until she told him.”

Each patient in the novel is in a way a separate short story. There is Justine, the movie star daughter of a colleague. She “had the white blonde hair of a Swedish child and the black eyes of a Dostoevsky heroine and those eyes blinked at Dr. Berman nervously.”

“Justine had already tried to drown Justine in a river of vodka.” And she steals things. “Don’t steal anything before our next appointment,” says Dr. Berman.

There is Anna Fishbein, home from college, depressed, unhappy. Dr. Berman wonders if there was incest. Anna is a self-cutter: “. . . the cuts on her arm, a lineup of cuts, a few bandages wrapped all the way around the forearm where the cuts had been particularly deep.”

Mike Wilson is a retired CBS newsman, a widower in his 70s who has lost any desire to continue without his beloved wife. He wants to die, “but not quite yet.”

I understand, said Dr. H., you haven’t been feeling so well.

No, said his new patient. I haven’t.

A woman, thought Dr. H., would now begin to speak. A man would wait to see if it was safe. A man would make sure the other man in the room would not be dangerous. A man would stay on his side of the wall until he could not any longer. Dr. H. said, I understand that you lost your wife.

In one of the most poignant sections of the novel, Dr. Berman treats a patient named Edith “born with large bones and wide hands and feet and eyes the color of the Caribbean Sea at sunrise.” Plump as a child, at some point Edith becomes monstrously obese — “her stomach stretched, her bowels tight, her shame covering her, inflaming the sores between her legs that came from the chafed flesh that surrounded her vagina.”

“. . . Dr. Berman had sat opposite Edith quietly for many months. She had leaned forward to hear her when her voice had been almost inaudible. She had listened to her talk of diets and her shame at the gluttony she only partially disclosed. She had given Edith her full attention, and as a result the predictable had happened. A small space had opened in Edith’s mind where she sometimes thought of things to tell Dr. Berman. And in that small space something new was growing, was it a small bud, a small new tender shoot of affection: was the word for it love and what did that love contain? Edith didn’t know but it brought her hope, this feeling, and it belonged to her and was the gift she wished to give to Dr. Berman and this new feeling made her bring in her poems. . . .”

It is 20 sessions before Edith actually gathers her nerve and takes the poems in three notebooks out of her bag to give them to Dr. Berman. And a few days later Dr. Berman, in her increasing dementia, unknowingly throws them out. At the following session Edith ever so tentatively asks about them.

Dr. Berman said, I will read them when you give them to me.

Edith was silent. She looked all around the office for her three notebooks. They were not on the table behind the couch. They were not on the windowsill.

I gave you my poems, she said in her smallest voice.

I have no poems of yours, said Dr. Berman, quite certain.

The novel is indeed black and blue and full of melancholy and sadness and pathos. Many of the patients are struggling with difficult life issues, divorce, disease, loss, emotional trauma. And behind all is Dr. Berman’s own decline, what eventually becomes a dignity-robbing and horrible decay into what her son thinks of as his “vanishing mother.” Not exactly the stuff of summer beach reading, but wise and well written and at times enormously moving.

Michael Z. Jody is a psychoanalyst and couples counselor with offices in Amagansett and New York City.

Anne Roiphe had a house in Amagansett for many years.

Keeping Up With Kundera

Linda Asher, an editor and translator who lives part time in Sagaponack, was last seen in these pages reviewing Ina Caro’s travelogue, history, and meditation “Paris to the Past.” She’s been at work, of course, on, among other things, translating Milan Kundera’s “The Festival of Insignificance.” The new novella was written in French, unlike “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and Mr. Kundera’s earlier novels, which were written in Czech.

This one follows four friends in Paris and philosophically, comically comments on contemporary society and its self-important preoccupations, from sex and death to art and identity. Even Stalin isn’t spared. From an 86-year-old author, then, a kind of summation.

Guess Who’s Back . . .

And now for something completely different: Standing at a confluence of a life summed up (speaking of) and the pages of The Star is one Hy Abady, who is just out with a follow-up collection of “Guestwords” pieces, “Back in The Star Again Again!” An explanatory subheading doubles down, promising “Further Stories From the East End. And Beyond.”

In them we find Mr. Abady most memorably recounting his decades-long career in the advertising biz, which, take it from him, ain’t what it used to be. Elsewhere, he explores the explosion in the use of clichés, picks apart the current state of theatergoing, ridicules his own retail skills, and bids adieu to his beloved Amagansett. All in a trim 76 pages.

Hunt & Light, a poetry publisher out of East Hampton and Brooklyn, is dedicated to advancing the work of young poets. On Saturday at 5 p.m., this will be manifested in the appearance of one Esther Mathieu at Harbor Books, the still-new shop on Main Street in Sag Harbor. She hails from Queens and is young enough to be studying at Colby College in Maine.

And speaking of newness, her debut collection, “Constellations,” is just the second published by Hunt & Light. The outfit’s founder is Lucas Hunt, late of Springs, whose poems and reviews have appeared in these pages previously.

Below is a selection from “Constellations.”

“Dreaming”

I want to have hands

that smell like bread dough and ink from all the things I've made

while the sun is still rising

over warm cups of tea,

water boiled in a bright-colored kettle

and poured into a mug on an old wood table.

I think if I typed on a red typewriter

and lived in a house full of noise I could watch quietly

I would be different.

But probably, all I really want

is to smell like morning,

and wear my hair in a sea-salted braid,

and use my hands to craft small eternities.

“The End of the

Rainy Season”

Marian Lindberg

Soft Skull Press, $15.95

In “The End of the Rainy Season: Discovering My Family’s Hidden Past in Brazil,” Marian Lindberg explores questions that all children eventually ask: How reliable are our parents? How sound is their version of reality? Can I trust their stories about the past?

In Ms. Lindberg’s case, these questions are entwined with personal questions about her romantic life, her health, her role as a parent, and her professional choices, as well as questions of greater scope, such as the impact of explorers on the environment and our responsibility to conserve land. The latter issues are no surprise, as Ms. Lindberg works at the Nature Conservancy. But her book is full of surprises, the most important being that a quest for knowledge can bring the most unexpected results.

Ms. Lindberg weaves together several narrative threads: her own memoir, which includes her struggles with health, right livelihood, and romance; each of her parents’ life stories, which include issues of class and gender roles; the history of the sinking of the Vestris, a ship bound for Brazil, the sinking of which resulted in much loss of life due to the captain’s poor judgment, and the history of explorers in Brazil.

On one hand, such a cacophony of narratives might seem a misguided overreach, but, in the context of Ms. Lindberg’s understanding of ecology, her authorial choice to include so much seemingly disparate material is actually a successful wedding of form and content, as the multiple narrative connections embody ecological thinking. As she writes:

“It occurs to me that those of us who accept scientific theories about the importance of the Amazon rainforest to the planet are a little like Brazil’s indigenous people of the past. We have no land titles, no deeds, no property rights in the conventional sense. Yet we feel our lives and our children’s lives depend in part on this place, and we believe that gives us a natural right to care and demand responsible action by those on the ground in Brazil.”

Ms. Lindberg treads on tricky ground here, emphasizing similarities at the risk of eliding important differences between the “we” of this passage — her target audience, mostly educated via a Western paradigm of knowledge, who still may exercise much choice about how exactly to react to our connection to the Amazon and other endangered places, and native people of Brazil, whose economic position and education gave them less agency when outsiders staked claim to their home. But Ms. Lindberg’s humility as an author and a thinker and her sensitivity to different perspectives allow her to effectively navigate this terrain.

In addition, the multiple narratives create a book that appeals to many readers. Want a medical narrative? You got it. An adventure story? That too. A romance? Sure. A deeper understanding of immigrant experiences? Yes. Her exploration of raising her son, conceived via a donor, and the unique definitions of family that can grow from such circumstances were especially deft and moving.

Of course, these various threads can be disorientating at times. But, again, this seems a deliberate part of Ms. Lindberg’s strategy — to recreate the experience of revisiting foundational stories of our lives as our understanding changes and old and new versions of reality bump into each other.

The title of the book explicitly refers to an actual season in Brazil, but like many moments in this book, Ms. Lindberg imbues it with a number of meanings. When she explains that the hardest rain comes just before the rainy season ends, readers are prepared for both extreme weather and other types of upheaval.

Ms. Lindberg is at her best as a writer when she allows her observations of the natural world to stand for observations of human psychology and society, in the title and many other places, such as her description of Baltimore oriole migration patterns at the book’s close.

In the end, many questions about the past will never be answered with any certainty, which leads to bigger questions: How do we move forward when our understanding is provisional? How do we make choices based on unstable knowledge? Ms. Lindberg’s big, ambitious book traces a path through this disarray, and in doing so she provides a map for the many migrations we face in the 21st century.

Stephanie Wade is assistant professor and director of writing at Unity College in Maine. She spends summers in East Hampton.

A senior staff writer at the Nature Conservancy, Marian Lindberg lives in Wainscott.

Poetry fans are in for a treat, as Grace Schulman and Kimiko Hahn are the next readers in this summer’s Poetry Marathon, held every Sunday at 5 p.m. at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett.

Ms. Schulman, distinguished professor of English at Baruch College and the poetry editor at The Nation for many years, is the author of a number of collections of poems, most recently “The Broken String,” from 2007, and “Without a Claim,” from 2013. A part-time resident of Springs, she has written a study of the work of Marianne Moore and edited a volume of her verse.

Ms. Hahn’s latest of her nine collections of poems is “Brain Fever,” from last year. She is a past winner of an American Book Award, teaches English in the M.F.A. program at Queens College, and lives on the North Fork.

The Poetry Marathon continues through Aug. 16, when Carole Stone and Virginia Walker will read from and discuss their work. A reception follows each reading.

It’s summer and the Jitney is packed,

every seat taken, except for the one

across the aisle, in which a man

has barricaded his window seat with

a briefcase and jacket, an act meant

to confront others with his superiority.

Munching chips and guffawing at

a YouTube video of an obese woman

riding a scooter down a country road,

towing a younger obese woman

in a wheelchair, he reminds me

of a neighbor’s dog that would steal

and bury our dog’s bones, then growl

defiantly on his side of our fence.

Pythagoras believed our souls ended up

inside the bodies of animals selected

as rewards and punishments.

The three giggling girls behind me,

stretching their legs into the aisle

every time the shy attendant passes,

forcing him to stutter apologies

in a Slavic accent — Poodles, probably.

Pythagoras also believed the shapes

of numbers symbolize our significance.

Well, sequestered here between work

and family, thought and dreaming,

I’m probably some kind of numinous digit

slowly evolving into, say, an aardvark

hurling down the highway inside a bus

camouflaged as a vodka bottle, on its way

to a barricaded future on the far side

of a fence where all our significance is buried.

Philip Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lives in East Hampton, will read from new work at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Aug. 8 at 5 p.m. with Grace Schulman of Springs, poet and professor of English at Baruch College. “Aardvarks” previously appeared in Slate.

When my 25-year-old grandson Jascha — an Elon Musk admirer and entrepreneur himself (The Dream Lab)  — visited us in East Hampton recently, he was completely engaged in reading Ashlee Vance’s smart biography (Ecco, $28.99). He hoped to see at least one Tesla, and then on his last day here, getting on the Ambassador bus to leave, he spotted two!

As it turns out, East Hampton boasts a handful, and sighting Teslas here is popular. One will be on display at the Authors Night event on Aug. 8; a tour of the Tesla factory is being auctioned then to benefit the East Hampton Library.

“A modern alloy of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs, Elon Musk is the man behind PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity, each of which has sent shock waves throughout American business and industry. Mr. Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as a science fiction fantasy.”

If this jacket copy seems like breathless puffery, the Elon Musk of this book actually lives up to such positive prose — and supports the notion that he is a force of nature. As of last month, Mr. Musk had an estimated net worth of about $14 billion.

Based on 50 hours of exclusive interviews with the subject and almost 300 people who know, work with, or worked for Mr. Musk, this timely and beguiling biography tells us of a very complex, ambitious man who leads a tumultuous life of world-changing companies, grave disappointments, business resurrections, and massive successes. Mr. Vance has written a valentine to high stakes and high tech.

Fans of the television series “Halt and Catch Fire” will recognize the supercharged business atmosphere and intensely focused lives of computer nerds who yearn to do whatever it takes to change the world . . . yesterday. (See Walter Isaacson’s book “The Innovators,” reviewed in The Star on April 9, to glimpse the types of quasi-nerdy high-functioning world-beaters Elon Musk resembles.)

Mr. Musk designed a computer game at age 12 and was a multimillionaire at age 27. In July 2002, eBay offered $1.5 billion to buy PayPal. Mr. Musk netted about $250 million, and he was off and running. Here’s a synopsis of his entrepreneurial enterprises:

PayPal is a worldwide payments system that provides online money transfers — electronic alternatives to traditional paper methods like checks and money orders. In 2014, PayPal moved $228 billion in 26 currencies across more than 190 nations, generating a total revenue of $7.9 billion.

Tesla Motors is an automotive and energy storage company that designs, manufactures, and sells electric cars, electric vehicle power train components, and battery products. In 2013, Tesla posted profits for the first time in its history. Global cumulative Model S sales passed the 75,000-unit milestone in June. Mr. Musk has said that he envisions Tesla Motors as an independent automaker aimed at offering electric cars to the average consumer, beginning in 2017 at prices starting at $35,000.

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) is an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company with its headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. Mr. Musk founded it in 2002 with the goal of creating the technologies to enable humanity to reduce space transportation costs (using fully and rapidly reusable rockets) and eventually colonize Mars.

SpaceX’s achievements include the first privately funded, liquid-propellant rocket, Falcon 1, to reach orbit (Sept. 28, 2008); the first privately funded company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft, Dragon (Dec. 9, 2010), and the first private company to send a spacecraft, Dragon again, to the International Space Station (May 25, 2012).

In 2006, NASA awarded the company a commercial orbital transportation services contract to design and demonstrate a launch system to resupply cargo to the space station. SpaceX, as of May of this year, has flown six missions to the station under a cargo resupply contract and plans to transport crew.

SolarCity is a company that designs, finances, and installs solar power systems, performs energy-efficiency audits, and retrofits and builds charging stations for electric vehicles. The company had more than 2,500 employees as of December 2012. The overall U.S. market for solar photovoltaic systems has grown from 440 megawatts of solar panels installed in 2009 to 6,200 megawatts installed in 2014. SolarCity helped found a rooftop photovoltaic power station solar-advocacy organization, the Alliance for Solar Choice.

Elon Musk emerges from this well-researched book as a worthy role model and mentor to my grandson and to a generation of adventurous entrepreneurs.

“Russian Tattoo”

A young Elena Gorokhova marries an American astrophysicist visiting St. Petersburg, comes to the United States to live with him in Texas, divorces, and moves to New Jersey.

She struggles with life in suburbia as a stranger in a strange land, with a new marriage and raising a challenging daughter, and yet portrays her life with charm and novelistic immediacy so feelingly that you experience with her “laughter, sorrow, joy, regret, love, and hurt,” as Alan Alda says in praising “Russian Tattoo” (Simon & Schuster, $26) and her bittersweet recollections.

Often moved to tears, I read this beautifully written and heartfelt memoir because “I felt her pain”; I’m familiar with the resettlement problems faced by émigrés from the former Soviet Union who moved to the U.S. starting in the 1990s, at the end of glasnost and perestroika. Helped by foundation grants and a career in science, I developed a program to teach U.S. capitalism and job searching to very high-functioning and credentialed scientists among those émigrés. Some had double doctorates from prominent Russian academic institutions and were driving taxis when they arrived in the U.S. Many became lifelong friends once they landed safely in careers worthy of their superb training.

Thus I was able to empathize with Ms. Gorokhova’s memoir — her travails of parenthood, of living in a new society, of marriage across cultures, of raising an independent child, and her relationships with her daughter and with her strong mother, who comes for a visit and stays for 24 years. She deserves a medal and a double valentine.

Here is how she describes a job interview with a dean at a college where she will teach language education.

“I saw from your résumé that you’re from Leningrad.”

“The real capital, much more beautiful than Moscow,” I gush, watching the dean half-close his eyes as if he had the image of the Hermitage imprinted on the insides of his eyelids.

“All those free universities and free health care,” says the dean dreamily, and I don’t know if I should say something to qualify the adjective free or keep quiet. I don’t want to tell him about hospital wards without water or sheets, or abortions without anesthesia, or university admissions boards with lists of party bosses’ children in their desks, so I remain silent. . . .

“Congratulations,” says the dean [when he offers her the job]. . . .

I say goodbye and [the dean] probably thinks I am smiling because I have enjoyed his musings on all those free perks I foolishly left behind, but the truth is I can already imagine [my husband’s] laughter when he hears about my new boss, the socialist with a Gucci belt.

This is one example of how her outsider viewpoint is able to make her unfamiliar new experiences resonate with our familiar ones — and make us realize that we share our lives and insights with hers. She helps us “see ourselves as others see us.”

“Shrinks”

Jeffrey A. Lieberman, M.D., is professor and chairman of psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and author of more than 500 scientific articles on mental illness and psychiatry. He is an authoritative guide in his masterful and astonishing new book, “Shrinks” (Little, Brown, $28), a great read, on the scientific origins, evolution, and revolutions in brain science and psychiatry, once considered the “stepchild” of modern medicine.

It was Buckminster Fuller who, speaking of Freud’s and Einstein’s dramatic discoveries, said that the greatest discovery of the 20th century was our understanding that the “invisible” is more important than the “visible.” One can debate the merits of this remark, but Einstein still stands tall and his work has prevailed, while Freud’s work has been diminished by brain research using functional nuclear magnetic resonance, other techniques, and by modern psychopharmacology.

“The Brain is wider than the Sky . . . [and] deeper than the sea,” Emily Dickinson wrote. Whether poetic understatement or poetic license, it partially captures a sense of mystery, complexity, and grandeur we feel when we contemplate the brain.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in four persons will suffer from mental illness and will need psychiatric attention more than any other specialty — and many will consciously avoid it even though treatments have been proven effective. Mr. Lieberman’s book attempts and succeeds very well in presenting “an honest chronicle of psychiatry with all its rogues and charlatans, its queasy treatments and ludicrous theories.”

The story addresses what mental illness is, where it comes from, and how it can be treated. The optimistic author believes that modern compassionate psychiatry is finally a true science that can “lead any person out of a maze of mental chaos into a place of clarity, care, and recovery.”

He shows this by dividing the book into three sections: the story of diagnosis, the story of treatment, and the story of psychiatry’s rebirth as a legitimate science. He presents compelling case histories of his patients, such as a schizophrenic daughter of parents who thought she merely needed to shape up, “buckle down, and get her act together.” Nevertheless, she responded well to hospital care, antipsychotic medicine, and cognitive therapy.

He tells us that no one was ever “cured” of homosexuality, even though many psychiatrists (including one whose son was gay) tried to do so from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s. “Sexual orientation disturbance” was ultimately eliminated as a disorder in 1987. Indeed, Dr. Saul Levin became the first openly gay leader of the American Psychiatric Association in 2013. Sadly, Russia and Nigeria still pass antihomosexuality laws.

One recurring character is Mr. Lieberman’s colleague Eric Kandel, who is both a psychodynamic psychiatrist and a biological psychiatrist. By studying brain structure, he discovered there were no anatomical changes in the activation of nerve cells in short-term memories, but long-term memory produces enduring structural changes in new synaptic connections. In 2000, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of neural circuitry and the biology of memory.

Mental illness still carries a stigma. Patrick J. Kennedy, when diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a member of Congress, said, “We need our families and friends to understand that the 100 million Americans suffering with mental illness are not lost souls or lost causes. We’re fully capable of getting better, being happy, and building rewarding relationships.”

Mr. Lieberman’s superb book helps us understand this as well as his medical specialty, as it matured from a “psychoanalytic cult of shrinks into a scientific medicine of the brain.”

Stephen Rosen, a regular contributor to The Star, lives in East Hampton and Manhattan.

These three books will be featured at Authors Night on Aug. 8, with Jeffrey A. Lieberman appearing at the cocktail reception and Elena Gorokhova hosting one of the dinners. The website is authorsnight.org.

Our daughter had just turned 3 when we applied for admission to the nursery school of the Lycee Francais de New York. At the time, the Lycee occupied one of the Upper East Side’s most impressive buildings, a Beaux Arts mansion on East 72nd Street just off Fifth.

The reception room, with 40-foot-high ceilings and a marble staircase curving away into who knew what nether regions, was daunting enough, but when a pale, thin woman dressed all in black came sweeping down the steps and crossed the enormous room to stop, scowling, before the row of seated infants and their jittery parents, all hell broke loose.

Several children began wailing. After a minute or two, having spoken not a word, she gave a brisk backward wave of the hand, indicating that they were dismissed, not to be interviewed that day and maybe never. The rest were lined up Madeline-like and led away.

Emily was accepted. To this day, I believe that the angry-looking woman was the actual test — that any child who didn’t cry at the sight of her got in. “How come you didn’t cry?” I once asked her (this was a child who cried if a button fell off her coat). “I was too frightened,” she replied.

A few years and another child later, there was this rabbit in a classroom at Spence — but never mind, that’s enough about me and my kids. Let’s talk about Wednesday Martin and hers, and her book “Primates of Park Avenue” (Simon & Schuster, $26), which every Upper East Side mother spending the summer anyplace between Aspen and Amagansett has probably either read by now or is afraid to, lest she recognize herself in it.

Having survived the rigors of apartment-hunting in an unfamiliar part of Manhattan and landed in a building she never identifies but that some Internet troll tracked down as 900 Park Avenue, Ms. Martin looks around her, realizes she’s left all her friends in her old downtown neighborhood, her mother’s back home in Michigan, not a soul on 79th Street or anywhere near it except her investment-banker husband gives a damn whether she and her 2-year-old live or die, and decides to do something to keep away the closet monsters. She’s written one memoir already (“Stepmonster”), so she’ll write another, from inside-out, about the Park Avenue mothers she’s hoping to befriend. Well, outside-in, to start with.

She must have hugged herself when the lightning struck: Tackle this new habitat, and the manners and mores of its female wildlife, within a pseudo-scientific frame, using your college knowledge of anthropology for scaffolding.

When, for example, the predators in the playground fell silent upon hearing that her little son was taking music lessons at “the pedestrian Gymboree” rather than the tony Diller-Quaile School of Music, she approached it as a personal failure. Stay-at-home Upper East Side mommies did have a job, she realized — or, more precisely, “a cutthroat, high-stakes career” — and it came before all else: to ensure the success of their kids. Every step, even the “right” music school for tots, was a rung on the ladder to the Ivies. “I could not help but think of Jane Goodall’s matriarchal chimp Flo . . . whose canny advocacy, sheer ambition, and skillful coalition building on behalf of her offspring . . . catapulted them to the top of the dominance hierarchy of their troop in Gombe, Tanzania. . . .”

(Speaking of dominance, Manhattan real estate brokers, many of them U.E.S. women whose children have grown and gone, get a chapter to themselves, as behooves a tribe within the tribe. The buyer’s broker, who icily informed Ms. Martin that finding an apartment in her desired “quadrant,” Fifth to Lex, 60th to 96th, was “not going to be easy,” turned out to be gelato compared to the seller’s agent.)

What mattered the most, though, and brought out the worst in her “conspecifics,” was the cutthroat competition to get their kids into a top-tier nursery school.

 This is an area where only fools, or people with older children already at the school, rush in; all others rightly fear to tread. Ms. Martin’s descriptions of the pre-K “misery sessions” she and her little boy endured will strike terror into the hearts of first-time parents and shudders of recognition, even many years later, into veterans of the application wars. “One day, holding my hand as we were about to enter yet another ‘playroom’ full of kids he didn’t know, he looked up at me and said, ‘Mommy, I can’t do this,’ and I wanted to weep.”

When her son was accepted, apparently after some string-pulling, at one of the “T.T.” schools, she thought she’d won the brass ring, but it turned out to be iron, cold as the shoulders she was getting from his classmates’ moms. “Aside from a shrinking water hole in the Serengeti during the dry season, there is no place more desperate, aggressive, dangerous, and inhospitable than the halls of an exclusive Manhattan private school at morning drop-off and afternoon pickup.”

They were playdate pariahs, mother and child. Was she not thin enough? Blond enough? Rich enough? Dressed-to-the-nines enough?

Bingo. Not only was Ms. Martin an unknown quantity, she hadn’t yet caught on that “the Upper East Side is a body-display culture,” as she informed a crowd that came to hear her read at BookHampton the other night. Although a self-acknowledged “total fashionaholic,” she didn’t understand that what you wore at the beginning and end of the school day mattered here, really mattered, and jeans with a thermal shirt, a la the West Village, did not.

She eventually found another, less predictable, way in to acceptance, but much of what follows — especially a now-infamous chapter on her obsession with the off-the-charts-expensive Hermes Birkin bag — involves the right clothes; for shopping (never carry plastic), for fitness classes in the Hamptons (start with lululemon), for coveted invites to ladies’ lunches: “The impeccably dressed and made-up group couldn’t have been further from the Efe and Aka people of the Ituri Rain Forest,” where “it is common for a woman to walk up to another woman and demand her beads. . . . Saying no is unheard of. . . . Of course, the fastidiously turned out women at Rebecca’s — elegant, refined, polite, and rich — would have fainted if I walked up to any one of them and demanded, ‘Jane, give me your three Pomellato stacking rings and Lanvin Happy bag NOW!’ ’’

This is funny stuff, and “Primates” is full of it, though plenty of people out there have said it’s full of something else. I cannot ever remember a book attracting such a storm of criticism even before it was published, most of it aimed ad feminam — at the author, not the book. Maybe they’re jealous that “Primates” has been optioned by MGM, or that its author is thin, blond, good-looking, and, surely now, rich. Read it for yourself and decide.

Wednesday Martin, who has a house in Sag Harbor, will be signing her book on Aug. 8 at the East Hampton Library’s annual Authors Night benefit.

Fridays at Five

The popular Fridays at Five series is back at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton with authors coming to discuss their books every Friday from July 10 through Aug. 28.

The program kicks off with Colson Whitehead talking about “The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death.” Then in July it’s Bonnie Verbitsky talking with Walker Vreeland about her “Home Cooked Hamptons,” Ken Auletta on “Lifetime Lessons Learned as a Journalist,” and Florence Fabricant on “Wine With Food: Pairing Notes and Recipes From the New York Times.”

In August, the series will feature Frances Cole James on “How to Wow: Proven Strategies for Selling Your [Brilliant] Self in Any Situation,” Arlene Alda talking about her “Just Kids From the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was: An Oral History,” Brooke Shields with Kathleen Marshall  on “There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me,” and, finally, to end the discussions, Alice McDermott discussing “Someone: A Novel.”

Admission is $20 for each talk or $80 for a pack of five. The authors will also sign books, which can be purchased on site. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres will be served in the library garden. The programs run from 5 to 6 p.m., with doors opening at 4:30.

Writers Conference

The Southampton Writers Conference at Stony Brook Southampton, which is part of the college’s master of fine arts program in creative writing and literature, has invited the public to this summer’s readings, lectures, panel discussions, salons, and receptions without having to be registered for credit. The cost is $950. The conference begins on July 8 and runs until July 19.

Roger Rosenblatt, a prolific writer and Stony Brook English professor, will offer five lectures on the craft of writing and be joined by such guests as the cartoonist Jules Feiffer. Evening programs will include readings by Billy Collins, who twice was the United States poet laureate, Amy Hempel, Ursula Hegi, Meg Wolitzer, and Melissa Bank, among others. Attendees can sign up until the first day by going to stonybook.edu/mfa/summer.

Those attending the conference will receive complimentary tickets to a program celebrating the launch of The Southampton Review’s  summer/fall edition at the college’s Avram Theater on July 18 at 7 p.m. The program, “Selected Shorts,” at which actors and writers will read excerpts from the review, is otherwise for those who subscribe to it.

Sunday marks the return of the venerable Poetry Marathon in Amagansett. This year’s series of readings starts at 5 p.m. that day with Joanne Pilgrim, an associate editor at The Star, reading from her verse, accompanied by Jan Grossman, a past fiction and poetry reviewer for the Rockefeller Foundation who has had poems published in American Arts Quarterly, among other journals. The readings are held in the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road, and a reception follows each.

The free series, organized by Sylvia Chavkin with the help of Annalee Collins, continues on July 19 with the playwright Joe Pintauro and the India-born Meena Alexander, whose collections include “Birthplace With Buried Stones.” The esteemed duo for July 26 is Grace Schulman, a professor of English at Baruch College and Springs part-timer whose latest book of poems is “Without a Claim,” and Kimiko Hahn of the North Fork, whose nine collections include “Brain Fever,” published last year by Norton.

Carol Sherman and Daniela Gioseffi are in store for Aug. 2, with George Wallace and Geraldine Green the following week. The series wraps up on Aug. 16, when Virginia Walker, whose latest is “Neuron Mirror,” and Carole Stone, the author of, most recently, “Hurt, the Shadow: The Josephine Hopper Poems,” read from their work.

Over at the Amagansett Library, the Authors After Hours series is back with another strong lineup of summer readings. It begins on Saturday at 6 p.m. with A.M. Homes, the East Hampton author of pungent short-story collections like “The Safety of Objects” and novels of how we live now, the most recent being “May We Be Forgiven.”

Following her on July 18 will be the hamlet’s own Carl Safina. The naturalist will talk about his new book, “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.” On July 25, also at 6 p.m., Chris Pavone will step to the lectern to discuss how his own experiences have informed his best-selling thrillers, “The Expats” and “The Accident.”

On Aug. 1 Tom Clavin will examine adapting books for the big and small screens, which is happening now with two of his books written with Bob Drury, “Last Men Out: The True Story of America’s Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam” and “The Heart of Everything That Is,” about Chief Red Cloud.

Also that month, on the 15th it will be Anna Bernasek and D.T. Mongan on “All You Can Pay: How Companies Use Our Data to Empty Our Wallets,” with the political cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall discussing his forthcoming “Snowden” the following week, and Christopher Bollen, the author of a new suspense novel, “Orient,” on the 29th.