The Arrogant Years

In this much-anticipated new memoir, Lucette Lagnado revisits her first years in America, first in Brooklyn, then at Vassar and Columbia, revealing a coming-of-age interrupted by a bout with cancer at age 16. Its devastating consequences would rob her of her ability to have children and of her "arrogant years" -the years defined by their overwhelming sense of possibility, invincibility, and confidence-leaving her with the lonely echo of her own fears and judgment: "I am not woman enough." Lagnado looks to the women sequestered behind the wooden screen at her childhood synagogue, to the young co-eds at Vassar in the 1970s, to her own mother and the women of their past in Cairo, and reflects on their stories as she struggles to heal, to make the leap from girl to woman without the grace and strength of her "arrogant years."