Suzannah Lessard, an author and writer for the New Yorker "who examined the ways in which people are marked by place--and the ways in which they, in turn, mark the landscape--and whose best-selling memoir, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family [1996], explored the dark history of Mr. White, the Gilded Age architect who was her great-grandfather," died January 29, the New York Times reported. She was 81.
Her other books include The View from a Small Mountain: Reading the American Landscape (2017) and The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape (2019).
Lessard grew up in a compound that her family called "the Place"--largely created by White--in St. James, on the North Shore of Long Island. "The centerpiece of the compound was Box Hill, a gabled confection designed by Mr. White, who was famous for the Beaux-Arts palaces that he and his firm, McKim, Mead & White, created for America's newly minted merchant-royals in the late 19th century--and for the scandal of his death," the Times wrote. In 1906, he was fatally shot by Harry K. Thaw, whose 21-year-old wife had been sexually assaulted when she was 16 by White.
Her great-grandfather's story, along with those of Lessard's "eccentric and erratic family," were part of the environment she lived in, the Times noted, adding that her memoir "was decades in the making. It was the book she could not write and yet felt compelled to write, and the writer's block she suffered often compromised her other work."
"Underneath the entrancing Stanford White surface is predation," she wrote. "Behind the aesthetic sophistication of a Stanford White interior is the blindly voracious, irresponsible force, both personal and that of a whole class, a whole nation out of control."
Lessard joined the New Yorker in the mid-1970s. "She was a true eccentric, in the best way," her friend Daphne Merkin, the author and essayist, said. "She thought originally and made connections that weren't immediately apparent. She roamed in her mind, always looking for a bigger context."