My Life at Grey Gardens: 13 Months and Beyond

by Lois Wright, Andrew Afram (Foreword), Andrew Mroczek (Foreword)

Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, known as Big Edie and Little Edie, were the aunt and cousin of former U.S. First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. They led an unconventional existence in Grey Gardens, a mansion in East Hampton. Their home was surrounded by overgrown gardens, and filled with fleas, cats, raccoons, and old cans and rubbish. In 1976, the release of a documentary film also called 'Grey Gardens' highlighted their unique lives among the East Hampton elite, and introduced the Beales to their cult fan following. In 1975, Lois Wright, a fellow artist and dear friend of the Beales, was invited to live with them in Grey Gardens. Wright kept a journal of her thirteen months with the Beales, and using those logs, has developed this book. 'My Life at Grey Gardens' offers the reader an intimate look at the daily lives of the Beales, and chronicles the events from Lois's arrival at the house through the passing of Big Edith Bouvier Beale in 1977.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography Memoir, History, Biography, Book Club

198 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 2007

About the author

Lois Wright (July 9, 1928 – October 13, 2023) was an American artist, author, and television personality. She was best known for her appearance in the 1975 independent documentary film Grey Gardens by Albert and David Maysles.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe I'm beginning to get an unhealthy obsession with the Beales. My friend got me the documentary, Grey Gardens, for Christmas along with this book. I feel something familiar in the Beales.

Lois Wright spent 13 months at Grey Gardens with Big Edie and Little Edie, after having known them for quite a while. This book is basically her journal that she kept while she was there. For background, Big Edie and Little Edie are aunt and cousin, respectively, to Jackie O. They are part of the Bouvier family. Grey Gardens, the Beales house in East Hampton, became famous when the Maysles' did a documentary in 1976 (which is well worth viewing).

Grey Gardens is a run down home and Big Edie and Little Edie are the eccentric recluses that reside within. The home is run down enough that Wright is forced to wear a hat while walking in the house so she won't be hurt when rats or raccoons fall from the walls or ceilings. When, not if. The Beales do not have access to a lot of money so Jackie helps them out whenever possible.

I consider Wright a bit of a twit, myself, but then you would have to be somewhat twittish to live for over a year in Grey Gardens. This book does give you a little more background info than you get from the documentary and includes time surrounding Big Edie's death at age 81.

Read the book and see the movie. Both are pretty much worth the effort.

[Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely bonkers and utterly fabulous....what total legends they are...

[Brian Francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the first book in my "Summer of Guilty Pleasures" reading list. If you haven't seen Grey Gardens (the original documentary and not the HBO movie), I wouldn't recommend this book because you'll have no idea what the hell is going on. If you HAVE seen the documentary - and you're a fan - then Lois Wright's book is required reading. It sheds light on what went on inside Grey Gardens after the documentary's release and also details the death of Big Edie. While I was hoping for a little more insight into the relationship between Big Edie and Little Edie, Wright captures the voices of both women perfectly while introducing us to Doris Francisco, a family friend who never made it into the documentary. And I thought the ending was quite poignant. These two women ended up trapped by their seclusion, delusions and their suffocating (and loving) dependence on one another.

[Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

After seeing the play "Grey Gardens," I was interested to learn more about the dramatic and reclusive Beale women. If this account is to be believed, the play glossed over the reclusive nature of their situation--they actually had a lot more people coming and going out of their lives than represented in the play.

The author of this book, Lois Wright, supposedly lived with the Beales for 13 months...it's never explained why she moved in with them, or on the other hand, why she moved out. What didn't make sense to me was why on earth she would want to live in such a filthy environment in the first place.

It is obvious that this book was self published. It's riddled with typos and grammatical errors. It was in diary format, and much of the text was insubstantial and mundane.

I'm glad I read the book, since I did learn more about the Beales--but it certainly wasn't high-quality literature!

[Peggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably only for the most "staunch" fans of Big and Little Edie.

[ClassicPink · Rating 1 out of 5]

The delusions are strong and real. The insanity is pervasive. The lies are blatant.

Something is wrong with this author. And anyone who has watched the Grey Gardens documentary knows that the things inhabiting the house were very unwell.

But Lois, dear delusional Lois, is a special kind of crazy. For starters she refers to herself as well-bred. While sleeping on beds that have been urinated on by cats that she herself refers to as inbred.

Her diary entries are spotty at best and her editor should be sued for breech of contract. Where are the examples of high breeding?

This book, though short and about as shallow as a puddle, was still difficult to get through. There was no real explanation as to why she arrived. Continuity between entries was missing to the point where I thought she just made things up.

Although the horrific conditions could not be made up. I do believe her bedroom was icy cold. How can one survive amid filth and squalor? Lacking heat, experiencing ice forming over your glass of water, and living among feral beasts- yet this is not addressed. She never describes how it smelled, how she bathed, how she survived.

However the real stinger was when she described Brooks, the only black person or person of color present, as an alcoholic saying he left “a mess” in the hallway. That whole entire house was literally condemned and could not have been more of a mess with all the CGI experts in the world challenged to create the filthiest mess in the world.

The audacity.

[Lee Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are a Grey Gardens fan (and if you aren't, why?), you know Lois as the strange little woman who attends the birthday party. It turns out that Lois actually lived at Grey Gardens for a little over a year, and this book is her self-published diary of that time.

Wright was in residence from 1975 to the end of 1976, so she was present at the very end of filming, when the Maysles Brothers were shooting just a few last things, through the premiere of the movie and the spotlight it threw on Little Edie. It sheds more light on a story familiar to viewers; it was shocking to read of all the times Little Edie went into the city, and reporters came to the house. It was also informative to learn the depth of Big and Little Edie's paranoia; they were in constant terror of burglars and kidnappers (it was the era of Patty Hearst) and bears (of course?!). Lois Wright was not the voice of reason in this circumstance, though--she seems to have been nearly as eccentric as our stars. The diary ends with Big Edie's death, and a poignant and still quirky scene where Little Edie dresses her mother's not-yet-embalmed body.

As a self-published book, this is full of the usual errors in spelling. But if you love the movie as I do (not for nothing is "Edith" my daughter's middle name), you need to read this funny little account.

[Joshua · Rating 2 out of 5]

This very well may be the strangest book I have read in a long time. And that's saying something. The amount of "what the fuckery" in "My Life at Grey Gardens" is... hard to describe. I knew the Beale's were crazy, but the book's author, Lois Wright, is almost as mad as they are. All I can say is that I will never look at cats in the same way again. This might be the most damning treatise about cats ever written. And I'm pretty sure that was not the author's intent.

[Lori Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading a magazine article about The Beales, I was excited to read from an insider's view.

I have no idea how people can live like that. I am a homebody, and don't particularly like to dust, but I don't have raccoons falling on my head from the rotten ceiling!

Fascinating.

[Siri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well I have to rate it a five since my Aunt wrote it :) But seriously, people live like this -- wow.

[Lynette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh my. This book delves a bit more into the world of the Beales, and boy, is it disturbing.

[Bonnie Morse · Rating 1 out of 5]

It would take way more time than this book is worth to describe how very bad it is, but I feel like I have to say something. I wanted so badly to like it--or rather for it to be worth liking. After reading Jerry Torre's marvelous The Marble Faun of Grey Gardens: A Memoir of the Beales, the Maysles Brothers, and Jacqueline Kennedy I was eager for yet another inside view of Grey Gardens. Which this is, but not a particularly useful or interesting one.

I noted in my review of The Marble Faun that Jerry displayed some "antipathy" toward Lois Wright. That definitely went both ways, because she completely wrote him out of the history of Grey Gardens, to an extreme and ridiculous extent. In Wright's telling of events, Jerry Torre simply does not exist. He's not in the movie, he never lived in the house, there simply is no such person. I was confused at first when reading entries about Little Edie's trip to the initial Grey Gardens premier, when Wright says she wasn't allowed to go along because there was simply no one else to stay at the house with Edith, as Torre recounts in great detail how he stayed with Edith during that time. (It was during a later "premier", after Wright moved in and more or less forced him out of the house, that she stayed "alone" with Edith. And Brooks, an occasionally employed man-of-all-work.)

I wondered how to reconcile his many pages of memories with her brief but dated "log entries", until later in the book when I realized she was adding/rearranging information without clarification. This book is presented as a diary, and the copyright is inexplicably 1978, but it is neither a straight-up log nor a proper memoir. Once I realized she had no problem playing with time and dates and recording much later memories as contemporary log entries, it became much easier to believe, due to her overall self-serving philosophy and the complete self-centeredness of the whole account, that she simply altered the date of her moving in and replaced Jerry's name with Brooks'. Not that she liked Brooks any better, it seems, but she wasn't competing with him for Edith's attention and motherly love.

That self-centeredness is the main thing wrong with the book. It's not about Grey Gardens, it's about Lois Wright at Grey Gardens, and Lois Wright is not a very interesting person. Unless, I suppose, you believe that she saw ghosts, that palm-reading (or, as she calls it, hand-analysis) is in any way valid, or that when she saw UFOs (or, as the Coast Guard called them, flares over the ocean) she was able to make them move closer with her mind. Since I think all of that is boring crap for idiots, she mostly came off as a boring, crap-filled idiot. It's one thing for Edith and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, close relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis to fear spies and kidnappers, even if no one knew who they were, but why on earth would anyone want to kidnap Lois Wright? She had all of the Beale paranoia and insanity, but none of the reasons. It's like she heard they were being filmed and just wanted to get in on it, and Little Edie's determination to keep her away from the cameras suggest she thought the same.

Wright never even acknowledges that she's only in the birthday party scene because she didn't move in until principal photography was over. By the time she was squatting there full time (having worn out her welcome with the last friend who took her in--Jerry wrote that that person's house burned down, but either he was confused or she had really bad luck because that happened to the friend she went to after leaving the Beales for unstated reasons), the Maysles were just dropping by for social visits, still photographs, and sound work. But she loves to talk about how she was kept out of "the filming" at Little Edie's insistence. She also talks a lot about the Beales demanding money from her. And how much she hates their cats.

Other reviewers wondered why she stayed there with the freezing temperatures, cat urine, broken pipes, no shower, no food, and a plague of fleas. It doesn't sound like she did it, as Jerry did, out of love for the Beales and a desire to try to make their lives better. Early on she says she loved Edith like a mother, but the tone of her entries is increasingly hostile, self-pitying, and hateful. I think she stayed because she had nowhere else to go. After 13 months of thankless misery and no Maysles movie money, she grabbed onto the first mutual friend who would have her and got out. The "...and Beyond" in the title refers to the few months between her leaving and Edith Beale's death, when she returned to Grey Gardens many times on the coattails of the mutual friend, Doris, whom Edith loved and depended on. Because Wright doesn't include anything that might make her look bad, we know nothing of the circumstances surrounding her leaving Grey Gardens beyond "I thought it was time", but during these return visits with Doris she mostly waits in the car or is relegated to the first floor kitchen while Doris is upstairs with the Beales (Edith being unable to leave the second floor).

Apparently she wrote a second book that is a rehash of the "logs" used for this one, plus more of her own life, but I can't imagine anything more pointlessly tedious so I won't be reading it. Having already gone on way too long, I'm just going to include some examples of the aforementioned time tampering and leave it at that.

Thursday December 25, 1975
[Long entry describing gifts, food, activities, and quoting lengthy conversations]
Doris Francisco gave lovely presents to the Beales, and gave me a cross made of wood, blessed by the priest, that I still have. Slippers from Big Edie...and I don't recall what Little Edie gave me...perhaps a scarf or a blouse. [Another page of descriptions and quoted conversation.]

The above is slipped into what is presented as a contemporary journal entry, but is clearly an unlabeled addition from much later. Otherwise she would probably know what gift Little Edie had given her on the day it was given, and still having Doris's gift would be much less noteworthy.

Saturday January 17, 1976
From my log for this date: "The house has turned extremely cold, even Big Edie's room. etc."

This is the only entry that directly states some of it is from the log, implying that some is not. How much of it is not, however, is unclear.

Thursday April 1, 1976
[Big Edie] was a wonderful sport, a person not to be forgotten.

Just randomly referring to her in the past tense in the middle of a paragraph ostensibly taken from a contemporary "log" a full 10 months before her death.

Thursday April 22, 1976
[...]The Rutgers students even came into the kitchen-studio and photographed my paintings and took pictures of me. First time, I wondered why Edie brought them in. Their camera looked expensive. They promised to send us prints but they never did. I wanted to see the photos of my paintings.[...]

Again, random comment from the distant future worked into a contemporary "log entry" with no note.

I marked a lot more of these but you get the idea. If the book were entirely journal that would be fine. Entirely journal with parentheticals or footnotes would be better. Entirely based on memory would also be fine. But this, where there is a journal with presumably the bare facts recorded, presented in the form of that journal with all manner of notes, addendum, and commentary shoved in willy-nilly without so much as an asterisk to let us know she's off book and winging that mother, feels really deceptive. Especially when she's taken such great pains to eliminate chunks of known history. The only thing I learned from it is that she's a liar. Exactly what she's lying about, how much, and why, all remain a mystery.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I give the book 2 stars if you are a casual Grey Gardens fan, four stars if you are more hardcore. If you have seen both Criterion DVDs, watched a bootleg of the Broadway show, and seen the HBO movie, this book is definitely for you. It details the time between the shooting of the movie and Big Edie’s death. Lois was the small woman who attended Big Edie’s birthday party in the movie. She later lived downstairs on a cot and used the large empty spaces in the house to paint portraits. She gives further insight into the running of the house. The raccoons all had distinct personalities but the cats were incredibly mysterious to her. Brooks, the handyman, was not to be trusted as a baby sitter for Big Edie because he had a major drinking problem. Later on he sobered up and was very helpful when Big Edie died. He and Little Edie were the only two people who were with her in the hospital when she passed. Jerry, the young man from the documentary, is never mentioned. The Maysles come off as a little aloof and occasionally manipulative. Jackie telephones frequently but does not appear in person in the book until the funeral. Lee is never mentioned until she accompanies Jackie to the funeral. The documentary was released to much fanfare during the time this diary was written, and Little Edie was off to NYC and other places quite frequently that spring. A minor event that I found quite amusing is when Little Edie went into town to see Robert Altman’s “Nashville” and for a few days after that, whenever she gets annoyed, she threatens to run off to Nashville. The book is adequately written for a diary. However, as the book draws to a close, there are increasingly frequent additions written in a different verb tense or foreshadowing future events. I wish these were put in brackets or italics since they could not have been written at the time and take me out of the moment when I’m reading. The book is very well written and descriptive when it describes the circumstances leading to Big Edie’s death (an untreated leg injury leading to septicemia) and the blizzard that strikes when she is hospitalized that continues until the funeral. An easy read, it took me a long time to get through because I couldn’t read too much at one time.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have recently been fascinated with the Grey Gardens movies (original and 2009 versions) and read this book to get an insider's look at the lives of Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onasis. The author, Lois Wright, an artist and palm reader, was a lifelong friend of the Beales' and lived with them at Grey Gardens in 1975-1976. The book covers her time there and through the death of Big Edie.
Although Lois loved the Beales dearly, her journaling reinforces what the movies imply: Big Edie is a bossy, impatient, controlling and somewhat emotionally abusive mother to Little Edie. Little Edie is an odd and paranoid, outspoken and devoted daughter. The two are co-dependent, living in squallor, reminiscing about better days.
Little Edie is constantly worried about people breaking in to the decrepit East Hampton mansion, and worries about someone: stealing their clothes and the cats, setting fire to the house, being kidnapped, spying on their eclectic lives.
I found their care of animals revolting: daily feedings of a multitude of cats and raccoons living in and destroying the home. Fleas and rats were a continual problem. At one point, they have 20 kittens, and never do they consider spaying or neutering any of them, even when a bout of distemper threatens them. On more than one occasion, dead cats are left on the bed for extended periods of time, until a "proper burial" could be arranged.
There are many visits from the Maysles (David and Al), who produced the original "Grey Gardens" of 1975. They arrange for Little Edie to attend many openings of the film in NYC, but they never really give any profits to the Beales', who desperately needed money to pay for utilities and food.
The writing is nothing special, and the editing is poor (many typos), but the meat of the story is intriguing in a car crash sort of way. I felt no pity for them, as they were complicit in sharing their lives with the world through the film. As much as they protected their privacy at the house, on some level they sought fame and exposure. A quick, easy, and interesting read.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book for my face-to-face book club. We are planning to watch the movie "Grey Gardens" at our next meeting. I certainly hope the movie is good because this book was horrible. Granted, before I read this book I had no previous knowledge of these people, so I don't get the significance of it whatsoever. After reading the book, I am still puzzled. Apparently the two main characters, Big Edie and Little Edie, are the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis. I guess the fascination with these ladies is that they live in filth and squalor, and are extremely paranoid and reclusive. The only purpose I could glean from this book is that it served to illustrate the eccentric nature of these women who happen to be related to someone famous. Whoever published this book should be ashamed of themselves because this book was poorly written and contained an embarassing amount of grammatical and punctuational errors. I really hope the movie is much better than this book. What a disappointment!

[Charlene · Rating 2 out of 5]

A diary reading from the woman who states that she lived with the Beales in the dilapidated mansion from 75 until 76. Although she doesn't mention it in direct words, it is easy to determine from the reading that there was some rampant mental illness in the Beales women, possibly even a bit in the author for living in rodent and flea infested filth. Overall, the book was just OK, not a hard read and somewhat interesting.

[Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever since watching [the original documentary] Grey Gardens last Saturday and its "revisitation" The Beales of Grey Gardens on Sunday, I have been a girl obsessed. Grey Gardens is the place I've been happiest lately, so it was hard for me to read this objectively. I liked it, but I could see it had its flaws, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but a hardcore fan of everything related to Grey Gardens and its inhabitants.

[Amie Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting companion to the documentary. Lois Wright was barely shown on film, but lived with the Beales during filming and kept a diary of daily life at Grey Gardens. Straight foward with no embellishments, this isn't a volume of prose, but it does give you insight into Big & Little Edie's daily life, and dwelves deeper into the deterioation of a once magnificient house.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only read this if you have an interest in the Bouviers/Grey Gardens documentary.

[Sophiaalmaria · Rating 2 out of 5]

'the ghost of grey gardens' ha! coattail rider.

[Miss M · Rating 1 out of 5]

odd story about a very eccentric family

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tremendously quick read describes life at the East Hampton residence of Edith Beale, aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and her daughter, Little Edie. Lois Wright was a friend and moved into the house for a period of thirteen months. The book is written in a journal style and is quite easy to read. I would recommend seeing the Grey Gardens film first before reading; that way you can hear their voices as you read. Wright does a wonderful job in capturing the essence of the Beales.

I take away one star for typos as well as sentence structure. In the introduction, Wright tells us that she went back later and added things to her journal, and this shows. The "tense" of some of the sentences doesn't match.

That aside, this was a humorous read. Any fan of Grey Gardens and the Beales should add this to their collection!

[Keely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Must read for Grey Gardens fans because it gives many details about the house and what it was like to actually live there (raccoons, rats, collapsing ceilings, waterworks, fleas, and all). Ms Wright is talented and bright and ahead of her time in many ways. She also doesn't hide the competitive relationship she had with Little Edie, and there are a few sections where you could make a case for subterfuge committed by one against the other. But this is the kind of realism GG fans will enjoy. The book was obviously self published and is filled with typos and usage errors but I still devoured every single word with relish.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting and true account as to what life was like at Grey Gardens in the later years, when the elderly Edith Bouvier Beales (cousin to Jackie Kennedy Onassis) and her daughter, Edie, continued to live there. Author Lois Wright was a neighbor who lived with the Beales for about a year, and the account of living with these eccentric ladies, in a decaying and filthy house, amidst many cats, kittens, raccoons and rats, is hard to put down. Yet, one can't help but like the Beales and take interest (and pity) in their plight as they finagle movie producers, harsh weather, cooking on only a hot plate, and keeping the press out.

[Rosie · Rating 3 out of 5]

For fans of Grey Gardens only, otherwise it's a rambling mess. Maybe that's obvious? This book was written in diary format by Lois Wright, who lived at Grey Gardens during the filming of the Maysles' documentary, although it seemed like much of it was written after the fact. I was struck by how paranoid they all were, and it kind of made me sad. The writing itself was decent, it had it moments, but it desperately needed a proof-reader. It's a quick read, though, and still enjoyable for fans of the ladies of Grey Gardens.

[Lynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just happened to watch the documentary on Turner Classic Movies one evening this past month, never had heard of it, and whoa! I couldn’t turn away. After the movie, the hosts were talking about the book written by Lois. I ordered it immediately!
I loved the snippets of life documented in Lois’ journal. It is so crazy, almost unbelievable. I was struck by how much love was shared despite the dire living conditions. Fascinating. Loved it.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is nothing I enjoy more than characters who are true to their unique self and a little family dysfunction and this delivers on both accounts. Easy read and a glimpse into some very interesting lives. It was hard not to develop a bond with the Beale’s, Lois and the other characters. Liked it much more than I was expecting to.

[S.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good supplement to the film, though a little emotionless at times.

[Jessica Reuter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun and entertaining. Another glimpse into the Bouvier-Beale women for fans of Grey Gardens.

[Jolie Joswick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would suggest watching the movie or documentary or both (which I have multiple times!) before reading this. It was an interesting supplement to the Beales already fascinating story.