The Looking Glass Brother

Peter von Ziegesar had just moved to New York and was awaiting the birth of his first child when a dark shape stepped from the looking glass of his past onto a Greenwich Village street. The Looking Glass Brother is Peter von Ziegesar's remarkable memoir of a life that began in the exquisite enclaves of Long Island's Gilded-Age families and is now lived, in part, as the keeper of his homeless and schizophrenic stepbrother, Little Peter. The Looking Glass Brother is a feast of memories from one of the last, great estates on Long Island's Peacock Point. Summers were filled with the glistening water of the Long Island Sound, pristine beaches, croquet games, butlers in formal wear serving dinners, and an endless stream of cocktails. When, after a string of affairs, Peter's father left his mother and remarried, the idyll was broken and several stepchildren, including Little Peter, entered von Ziegesar's life. Little Peter was an angelic and brilliant young boy, a violin prodigy called by a teacher "the next Paganini," who, during adolescence, spiralled down to become one more homeless man living on the street. In this big-hearted memoir, Peter von Ziegesar mixes memories of life on Peacock Point with the turbulent joys of urban fatherhood and the responsibility he feels for his brother, a man with the same name as his, but who lives a desperate and very different life.