Papering the House: A Memoir

From the New York Times bestselling author and beloved critic and columnist, a memoir about the tangled pursuits of art, ambition, and belonging, set against the backdrop of a tumultuous and tragic era of New York theater In 1980, Frank Rich joined the New York Times as a drama critic, a dream job that thrust him into the heart of the theater world he had set his sights on from an early age. As a child of divorce in Washington, DC, Frank had found refuge in Broadway cast albums and haunted the city’s touring house, the National Theatre, as a theatergoer and then as a teenage ticket taker, trading the emotional turbulence of his home for a surrogate theatrical family. But upon arriving at Times Square in adulthood, Frank found he had lashed himself to the mast of the New York theater scene just as it was starting to lilt. Drowning in red ink, and with the lethal AIDS epidemic on the horizon, Broadway was in no position to save itself, let alone him.