Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir »

The great-great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Wendy Burden is a former illustrator, zookeeper, taxidermist, owner and chef of the bistro Chez Wendy, and art director of a pornographic magazine-from which she was fired for being too tasteful. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

In the tradition of Sean Wilsey's Oh The Glory of It All and Augusten Burrough's Running With Scissors, the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt gives readers a grand tour of the world of wealth and WASPish peculiarity, in her irreverent and darkly humorous memoir. For generations the Burdens were one of the wealthiest families in New York, thanks to the inherited fortune of Cornelius "The Commodore" Vanderbilt. By 1955, the year of Wendy's birth, the Burden's had become a clan of overfunded, quirky and brainy, steadfastly chauvinistic, and ultimately doomed bluebloods on the verge of financial and moral decline-and were rarely seen not holding a drink. In Dead End Gene Pool, Wendy invites readers to meet her tragically flawed family, including an uncle with a fondness for Hitler, a grandfather who believes you can never have enough household staff, and a remarkably flatulent grandmother. At the heart of the story is Wendy's glamorous and aloof mother who, after her husband's suicide, travels the world in search of the perfect sea and ski tan, leaving her three children in the care of a chain- smoking Scottish nanny, Fifth Avenue grandparents, and an assorted cast of long-suffering household servants (who Wendy and her brothers love to terrorize). Rife with humor, heartbreak, family intrigue, and booze, Dead End Gene Pool offers a glimpse into the fascinating world of old money and gives truth to an old maxim: The rich are different.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Memoirs by poor little rich kids tend to be pretty interchangeable. The side effects of the Too-Much-Money-Disease are familiar. From the parents, we can expect absenteeism, self-indulgence, profligacy, alcohol abuse; from the neglected children, lack of focus, drugs, and depression. Wendy Burden's Dead End Gene Pool contains all of the above, but is lifted above the standard product by its author's powerful, idiosyncratic voice. Far from portraying herself as a victim, Burden comes across as a formidable hard-ass, turned almost to steel by her bizarre upbringing but not -- or not quite -- deprived of the ability to feel.

Descended on her father's side from Cornelius Vanderbilt and on her mother's from a long line of Massachusetts puritans, Burden unsurprisingly opts to focus on the paternal heritage. "Even though this book is about my father and my mother," she begins, "the truth of the matter is my mother's family didn't have a lot of money, and my father's family did, and rich people behaving badly are far more interesting than the not so rich behaving badly." William Burden III, Wendy's father, killed himself when she was very small, and from that time on she and her brothers lived with their mother only on the rare occasions when she wasn't partying in some lotus-land like Palm Beach or Tijuana; eventually they came to view her as "a glamorous lodger who rented the master bedroom suite." The rest of the time the children were with their grandparents in what the author calls Burdenland, the couple's insanely grand demesnes in New York City, Northeast Harbor, Hobe Sound, and Mount Kisco. (The Fifth Avenue apartment, for those who are interested in such details, had fourteen bedrooms). Little Wendy distanced herself from her weird surroundings by cultivating a macabre streak and modeling herself on Wednesday Addams.

It was a surreal life, and Burden possesses the intelligence and dark humor to appreciate its more grotesque elements. Her narrative spares no one, not even herself and certainly not her careless, highly-sexed, frequently drunken mother. But as the book's dedication ("For my mother, goddamn it") reveals, one can sense a grudging affection behind every barbed sentence.

--Brooke Allen