Overview

"Bunny Mellon, whose life was marked by astonishing good fortune as well as tragedy and scandal, remains a singular figure in the annals of American design. She had her finger on the pulse of American culture and possessed a rare sense of style and grace. Her most celebrated work--the White House Rose Garden--demonstrated how formal restraint and the sparing use of color could be deployed to maximal effect. In I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Mac Griswold--who knew Mellon personally--delves into her subject's closely-guarded personal archives to construct an unrivaled portrait of a woman as complex and multifaceted as the gardens and homes on which she left her mark. This book explores the tension between Mellon's idea of herself as a ""poor little rich girl"" and her own enterprising spirit. Mellon tested the anodyne 1950s model of woman as-wife-as-mother by getting a divorce, admitting candidly to her first husband that she wanted a richer one. She imperiously traded old friends for new, and ultimately used her reputation, her connections, and above all her money to help fund John Edwards's short-lived presidential campaign. How Mellon's character, style, and taste developed together to produce her greatest accomplishments--private and public--is the real subject of this biography."

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Mac Griswold is the author of The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island, Washington's Gardens at Mount Vernon, and The Golden Age of American Gardens. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Travel + Leisure. She lives in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Christa Lewis has narrated 200-plus audiobooks. She is a classically trained actress with a four-year conservatory training in voice and acting. She has a smart and funny vibe, but can also meet the moment in straightforward or somber works of nonfiction thanks to a seventeen-year stint as a newsreader. Christa speaks accent-free German fluently and offers a variety of believable accents and dialects. Her narrations are well received: there have been seven AudioFile Earphones Awards across a variety of genres-biography and memoir, YA, and literary fiction-as well as a 2019 SOVAS Voice Arts Award in Biography and two Audie nominations.

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