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Update: Frances Stroh, a fifth-generation member of the family with its name on a beer with Detroit roots, flew back here Monday from San Francisco to promote her memoir.
The first-time author speaks and signs copies of "Beer Money" this evening in Dexter and Thursday in Midtown Detroit:
- June 8, 6 p.m.: Seventh annual Storymakers’ Dinner at Zingerman’s Cornman Farms, 8540 Island Lake Rd. Ticket details ($40 and up).
- June 9, 7 p.m.: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 4454 Woodward Ave. Conversation moderated by Toby Barlow. (Free; $5 suggested donation.)
In The New York Times last month, book critic Akiva Gottlieb writes that Stroh "blames the combative African-American mayor Coleman Young for disrespecting her family." The review adds:
Stroh isn’t angry or mournful about the family’s squandered nobility, which she experienced only as residue. The book offers an ambivalent understanding of a complicated birthright, and none of its drama feels like an airing of dirty laundry. . . .
“Beer Money” argues that “the brewery, the family and Detroit all tumbled together, a long-eroded cliff falling whole into that inland sea.”
In a Facebook post, the expatriate says she's "excited to be back in the city that formed me in my youth and which has provided so much artistic inspiration ever since." Stroh adds:
Detroit's renaissance -- for real this time -- is inspiring on so many levels. It means there is hope for every American city, for every American person and for America itself. Detroit never gave up.
Stroh, 49, also spoke about Detroit this spring with San Francisco writer Sarah Medina of 7x7, a lifestyle site:
I go back to Detroit a couple of times a year and I always stay downtown because of the city’s vibrancy and explosive sense of potential. Detroit today is an epic story of self-reinvention, and a lifelong source of inspiration for me as an artist.
My book ends in 2009 in a final scene where my brothers and I are driving through the city, observing the desolation—the defunct stoplight grid, the torched houses, the absence of any grocery store chains—and yet the artists are moving in and setting up shop in abandoned warehouses and storefronts. The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit has just opened its doors, and the Detroit Institute of Arts has just expanded. Urban renewal groups are planting vegetables in open fields.
It’s been incredibly gratifying to see these changes take place so rapidly even as I’ve been doing the final edits on the book, literally fulfilling the hope my brothers and I felt in those last pages set in 2009, when things looked so bleak for Detroit.
Original article, May 3:
Book blurbs occasionally overflow from praise into parody. That's not necessarily true for a new memoir by Frances Stroh of that family, although her publisher's description could summarize a TV miniseries:
"'Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss' is at once a recollection of a city, an industry and a dynasty in decline, and the story of a young artist who struggles to find her way out of the ruins," HarperCollins says of the book released Tuesday,
That sounds dramatic, but so are the 49-year-old author's tales of her family and its brewing empire. A reviewer in Washington, D.C., admires her "effective narrative about the shared fate of the Stroh Beer Company, Detroit’s emblematic manufacturing status, and the Stroh family itself." Russell J. MacMullan Jr., writing in the Washington Independent Review of Books, adds:
In a kind of social voyeurism, Frances Stroh’s memoir is our lens through which we observe the devastating and centrifugal forces in her family. Yet the author seems to assure us that the rich, despite all the fantasies and notions we might have about them, are as complicated, messy and flawed as we are. Her story, then, is about a desperate and sometimes aimless search for connections of love among her family members and for meaning inside of privilege.
Most of her saga is set in Grosse Pointe, where the family lived, and Detroit. MacMullan's review has a stark summary:
By 1984, the Stroh family business was worth $700 million, making it the richest privately held beer company in the country.
From that high-water mark, the family committed a series of stunning missteps that included taking the brand national, leveraging the future with loans and real-estate ventures, and a myopic dependence on Detroit, all the while misreading changes in consumer preferences and the competition. Grosse Pointe, a suburban enclave for the wealthy manufacturing class and the old rich, stood in stark contrast to the precipitous decline of nearby Detroit.
Frances Stroh, a fifth-generation member of the founding family, attended boarding school in Connecticut before graduating from Duke University with a psychology degree and from the Chelsea College of Art in 1997 with a master's as a Fulbright scholar.
She lives in San Francisco, where "she hasn’t been able to find the product bearing her name," Robert Allen writes in the Detroit Free Press.
Promotional events are scheduled in California, Washington and Brooklyn, as well as in Deter and Detroit next month:
- Dexter, June 8, 6 p.m.: Seventh annual Storymakers’ Dinner at Zingerman’s Cornman Farms, 8540 Island Lake Rd. Ticket details ($40 and up).
- Detroit, June 9, 7 p.m.: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 4454 Woodward Ave. Conversation moderated by Toby Barlow. (Free; $5 suggested donation.)
'The Backstory,' by Frances Stroh
At her website, the author tells how she decided to write the 336-page book:
Frances Stroh came back to Detroit from San Francisco "to pore over the family archives."
For several years, I’d been at work on a novel with an artist protagonist whose family had lost their wealth. It was a true work of fiction, not a thinly veiled memoir, and the story wasn’t quite coming together.
When my father died in 2009 (soon after he’d received the news that the Stroh Brewery Company would cease to pay quarterly dividends), I realized the ending to the real story I wanted to write—the memoir about my coming of age as an artist in my family—had finally presented itself.
And because my father had appointed me as the executor of his estate, I spent a tremendous amount of time sorting through and selling off his extensive collections of guns, guitars and cameras, to name just a few. Each object in my father’s house evoked a maelstrom of memories, scenarios and complex family dynamics, and the idea for the book was born of these reflections.
The book required a good deal of research and trips back to Detroit to pore over the family archives, as well as interviews with family members. I dug into old journals, researched the beer industry on the Internet and spent a tremendous amount of time alone not only writing the book but also delving into memories that were sometimes very painful.
Revealing certain family truths, such as my brother Charlie’s drug addiction and subsequent incarceration, or facts about the business itself, had always been taboo in my family, so the writing of the book over the course of four years was a way to come to terms with the past and allow the truth to breathe out in the open air. It was also a way to begin to see my childhood and coming of age as an artist in my family not as a collection of disconnected experiences, but as an individual path as idiosyncratic and unpredictable as any other person’s path.
We cannot always choose our circumstances, but we can chose how we live in the world, and I chose to write about my life and the lives of the people who have been most important to me.
