The Clancys of Queens

Audio is an ideal format for Clancy's memoir of a youth spent mostly in the New York City borough of Queens—with every other weekend luxuriating in Long Island's Hamptons. Read by the author herself, the work wryly and lovingly describes the people who kept Clancy tethered as she moved between wildly different worlds, including parents, friends, denizens of the local bar, and her irascible Italian grandmother. Those glancing at the title and expecting a straightforward story of an Irish American family may be disappointed, but Clancy paints a much richer canvas, mining the cross-cultural landscape for humor and occasional tragedy in a series of vignettes bound by the through line of family. Listeners will be pulled in quickly by Clancy's voice and emerge six hours later, blinking and wondering why they aren't in New York.