Interview: Richard Price

In the late 1980s, when Richard Price had started to make serious money as a novelist and screenwriter, he moved with his wife and two young daughters into a newly renovated loft apartment in rapidly gentrifying lower Manhattan. All four of his grandparents had arrived in the Lower East Side as immigrants to America in the early years of the century, before fanning out to Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1920s and 30s. As for many Jewish Americans, the area was part of his childhood mythology and so, when he moved into his new home, Price was keen to show it off to his grandfather. "So I asked him to come down there," he recalls, "and he really thought I was mocking him. He told me how he'd spent his life trying to get out of this place. And now here was his grandson, his rich, successful, American grandson, paying a huge amount... [read full story]