Leila Philip

Viking 2001, Penguin 2002
After her father’s sudden death in 1992, Leila Philip and her family faced the imminent loss of the Hudson River Valley Farm that had been home to the Philip and Van Ness families since 1732. Leila took an unpaid leave from her job and set out with her mother to save their farm and the family home, a sprawling Federal period mansion called Talavera. After fifteen generations of Philip men, it would be up to these two determined women to hold off the twin threats of bankruptcy and urban sprawl. Now in her startling new memoir, award-winning author, Leila Philip, tells this remarkable story.

Going home led Leila on an unexpected journey into the past as she and her mother sought to chart a future for their commercial fruit orchard. Stumbling upon family letters, belongings and secrets, Leila peeled back the layers of human drama and history to discover a past that was inextricably woven into three centuries of U.S. history. In A Family Place, Leila Philip brings to life the people and events that shaped her family and Talavera. Across the generations we meet colonial Dutch farmers, Revolutionary Generals, one of the first mayors of Washington D.C. Civil War heroes, freed slaves, ambassadors, and a cast of wonderfully renegade aunts who fled Talavera in search of adventure around the world.

Against this background of land and people, Leila Philip reveals to us all the elements of farming life at Talavera, from horticulture to art history to bee keeping and romantic era landscape gardening. And in her quest to uncover and understand life at Talavera, Leila inevitably finds a place for herself, as she and her family and their farm embark on a new century in the Hudson Valley.

"Mesmerizing... Both narrative threads are profoundly personal. Braided together with insight, the pay homage to the ideals of home and family with a resonance that should extend beyond her home region."

"In A Family Place, Leila Philip manages to seduce the reader into wanting to know what’s happened for centuries behind the doors of her family’s house... an unpretentious, subtly shaded story of the importance of understanding the ghosts and heroes that reside in every ancestral home."

"Riveting... One of the most finely written family histories available."

"Both a spirited defense of a way of life in the face of encroaching urban excesses, and a history of a home that contained more than a few family secrets. It’s all told with an affection for place and a passion for preservation."

"Leila Philip’s memoirs of her family’s orchard in the Hudson Valley are lush and charming but refreshingly realistic."

"The writing is poetic, haunting, the subject riveting, the research prodigious, the people just wonderful... I read this one over a few sunny afternoons and have been thinking about it ever since."

"Through letters, journals, conversations and speculations, Leila Philip teaches us how to eavesdrop on the past. A Family Place should be in the library of everyone who has marveled at how family history connects us to the place we call home and the place we discover through the secrets they left behind."

"Like the house at its center, Leila Phililp’s A Family Place is elegant but also generous, full of feeling but never sentimental; more than once its subtle moral shadings reminded me of Forster’s Howards End. Large in scope than memoir, but more intimate than mere history, Philip’s genealogical ledger expands with each new chapter, reflecting and adjusting American notions of family, land, lineage, service and country."

"In this eloquent memoir, Leila Philip deftly braids elegance and struggle, memory and loss, past and present, place and time. With wit and insight, she probes the intricate ties of landscape and history, finding in her family farm deep reserves of meaning and mystery."

"Leila Philip’s view of her family’s land is, in part sweeping and romantic, a panoramic view much like the luminous paintings of the Hudson River School, yet nothing in her detailed narrative of this cherished place dwarfs the lives of those who have lived there. They live again in her telling. Philip grafts history, natural history and autobiography into a stunning performance, as tempting as the Golden Delicious apples that grace the trees of her orchard."

"Leila Philip understands better than anyone just how complex our ties to the land are. In deliberating over the mysteries of her family’s history and questioning her own dreams and responsibilities toward the family’s orchards, she has created a rich and textured world for a reader to inhabit. A Family Place is full of intelligence, gracefully written, and guided by a devoted heart."