Claire Nicolas White

Claire White was born in Holland, the daughter of unconventional, high-spirited parents: Her father was a stained glass artist, her mother a sculptor. Their emotional, artistic, and spiritual experimentation during the 1920s tested the limits of traditional marriage and the understanding of young Claire. Flaring jealousies periodically disrupted the family's idyllic life by the North Sea, even transplanting them several times.

In colorful vignettes Claire fits together the fragments of her European childhood and her family's struggle to acclimatize after emigrating to the United States in the 1940s. After the war Claire drives with her mother to California, where they visit her illustrious aunt Maria, married to Aldous Huxley. When her parents return to Europe, Claire continues to straddle two worlds, torn between past and present.

When the author says of an old friend, "Culture, to him, is not a question of sophistication but a kind of love affair," she is also describing the familial atmosphere that nurtures her. This intimate portrait pays tribute to a bygone Europe, a period of brilliant expressionism and "high Gothic sensibility."