Piper Weiss grew up in Manhattan in the 1980s and ’90s. She played tennis and had her own tennis coach, Gary Wilensky. She grew up to be a journalist still lives in NYC. She says in her epilogue that at 38 she is single and without children, and she says that is not her choice. There’s a speculation there about whether her experience with Wilensky had a lasting effect on her life. Her book, You All Grow Up and Leave Me, is as much about Weiss’s experience as a privileged young woman in a wealthy city at a particular time, as it is a crime story about Wilensky. She recounts her childhood, her friendships with other girls, and her relationship with her mother. We get a picture of a world of prep schools and parties, giving plenty of opportunity but also confining in significant ways.

Weiss is the one who wanted a tennis coach and her mother grants her wish. She spends a lot of time with Wilensky in Manhattan and upstate at tennis camps, and she wants his approval and attention. It turns out that he is a twisted character who obsessed over the girls he taught. His behavior escalated as his life went out of control, and he eventually killed himself after a failed kidnap attempt. Weiss has done research into Wilensky’s life for this book and gives some indication of how he managed to get into the position of a a high school and a private coach. It’s not a deep psychological profile, but she does provide some insight into what he was like.

This memoir is probably of most interest to those who can easily relate to Weiss’s world, growing up in a Jewish family on the Upper East Side. Weiss is a strong writer whose conversational sentences flow well, and the performance of the unabridged audiobook by Brittany Pressley is sympathetic.

© 2019 Christian Perring

Christian Perring teaches in NYC.