Papering the House

From the New York Times bestselling author and beloved critic and columnist, a memoir about the tangled pursuits of art, ambition, and belonging, set against the backdrop of a tumultuous and tragic era of New York theater

In 1980, Frank Rich joined the New York Times as a drama critic, a dream job that thrust him into the heart of the theater world he had set his sights on from an early age. As a child of divorce in Washington, DC, Frank had found refuge in Broadway cast albums and haunted the city’s touring house, the National Theatre, as a theatergoer and then as a teenage ticket taker, trading the emotional turbulence of his home for a surrogate theatrical family. But upon arriving at Times Square in adulthood, Frank found he had lashed himself to the mast of the New York theater scene just as it was starting to lilt. Drowning in red ink, and with the lethal AIDS epidemic on the horizon, Broadway was in no position to save itself, let alone him. In a rapidly changing cultural world, he clung to the edge of a dream that was increasingly out of reach.

Papering the House is Frank’s account of those vibrant but bittersweet years, of the theater he worshipped, and the life he built around it. Vaulting between his intimate memories and theater history, he brings to life the smoke-filled New York newsrooms in the last gasp of the print era, opening-night intrigue, and towering personalities, including Joe Papp, David Merrick, and Stephen Sondheim. He recounts the controversies he waded into as a critic alongside the industry’s existential crises of the 1980s. As he navigates fatherhood, divorce, new love, and great loss, Frank begins to understand why he sought shelter in theater all those years ago, and in retracing his path, discovers that the story he must finally understand is his own.

At once an ode to theater, its joys and its disappointments, and an evocative meditation on family—both the one we inherit and the one we try, however imperfectly, to build for ourselves—Papering the House is the moving memoir of the boy who ran away to the theater, and the man who had to find his way back to the world beyond the footlights.