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A review by paperbacksandpines
You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession by Piper Weiss
2.0
You All Grow Up and Leave Me is a dual genre book. Part coming of age memoir and part true crime, it tells the story of Piper Weiss's adolescence, interwoven with her experiences with her tennis coach, Gary Wilensky.
To be honest, I had no interest in Piper's memoirs. Reading about a privileged girl from NYC who grew up attending an all girls boarding school doesn't hold my interest. I just wanted to learn about Gary Wilensky and his story. Wilensky had been grooming his favorite girls for years, but thankfully, he didn't have a chance to do more harm before he was stopped. Weiss had a strange fascination with wanting to be one of his chosen girls, which weirded me out. I really could not wrap my head around this desire and this made it hard for me to empathize with her.
This book was okay but not great. Since it wasn't written by an investigative reporter, but rather a freelance editor and writer, I'm wondering if Wilensky's story could have been further fleshed out by someone in the vein of Ann Rule or Greg Olsen. In the hands of someone more capable, it would have been better without the memoir and with Gary's life more fleshed out.
To be honest, I had no interest in Piper's memoirs. Reading about a privileged girl from NYC who grew up attending an all girls boarding school doesn't hold my interest. I just wanted to learn about Gary Wilensky and his story. Wilensky had been grooming his favorite girls for years, but thankfully, he didn't have a chance to do more harm before he was stopped. Weiss had a strange fascination with wanting to be one of his chosen girls, which weirded me out. I really could not wrap my head around this desire and this made it hard for me to empathize with her.
This book was okay but not great. Since it wasn't written by an investigative reporter, but rather a freelance editor and writer, I'm wondering if Wilensky's story could have been further fleshed out by someone in the vein of Ann Rule or Greg Olsen. In the hands of someone more capable, it would have been better without the memoir and with Gary's life more fleshed out.