My G-String Mother

Erik was 12 when Gypsy decided she was through with striptease—'I’m forty-two years old. Too old to be taking my clothes off in front of strangers.' Her endless schemes for staying famous and maintaining their extravagant lifestyle—a best-selling writing career, a musical based on her life, a disastrous attempt to turn her home movies into a blockbuster—make for comedic yet poignant reading. My G-String Mother is a stylish, incisive portrait of two lives: an awkward adolescent who was as much confidante, co-conspirator, and companion as son, and the legendary woman who told police at a raid at the famous Minsky’s burlesque house, 'I wasn’t naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight.'"One fears a Mommie Dearest or at best a made-up Auntie Mame. And in Preminger’s surprisingly informative and entertaining book, we sort of get a combination of both. But there is a third person here – a woman of enormous good humor, eccentricity, and intelligence."
-The San Francisco Chronicle

"This book absolutely had to be written."
-London Review of BooksErik Lee Preminger was born Erik Lee on December 11, 1944 in New York City. He is a writer and actor and is the son of Gypsy Rose Lee and director Otto Preminger. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.