It’s the book everyone on the Upper East Side is talking about. But is “Primates of Park Avenue,” an exposé on the moneyed mommies of Manhattan, really true?
A Post review of the best seller found holes big enough to drive an Escalade through.
Author Wednesday Martin — whose real first name is Wendy — claims in the memoir to have spent six years “doing field work” with her two kids on the Upper East Side conducting an armchair anthropological study.
But Martin only lived there for three years, with one kid, and mentions stores and services that didn’t exist, calling into question the scenes and behaviors she describes.
“Primates” includes eyebrow-raising anecdotes, such as the claim that some women receive yearly “wife bonuses.” After readers expressed doubt, Martin backpedaled, telling New York magazine: “I don’t necessarily think it’s a trend or widespread. It was just one of the many strange-seeming cultural practices that some women told me about.”
Although the book includes no such disclaimer and is advertised as a “memoir,” Martin told The Post she “telescoped certain parts of the narrative in order to protect the privacy of friends, neighbors, associates and family.”
That “telescoping” seems to have moved events that happened in different neighborhoods and put them on the Upper East Side.
In the book, Martin says she and her husband moved from the West Village for her toddler son. She describes being forced to undergo an unusual interview to purchase her Park Avenue abode.
The co-op board, she says, held the interrogation in her bedroom, where she was confined because of a difficult pregnancy. She wears a strand of pearls while propped up in bed, the board members gathered around her.
It’s an amusing scene.
Except, while property records show her and her husband bought an apartment at 900 Park Ave. in January 2004, she does not appear to have been pregnant at the time.
Martin’s first son was born in 2001 and her second was born in 2007 — the year she moved from the Upper East Side to the Upper West Side.
Throughout the book, she claims to have been raising two boys on the Upper East Side. They are her supposed entree into the world of play dates and tutors.
Martin said she was shunned by the “Mean Girl Moms” who looked down on her as an outsider.
‘I TELESCOPED CERTAIN PARTS OF THE NARRATIVE IN ORDER TO PROTECT THE PRIVACY OF FRIENDS, NEIGHBORS, ASSOCIATES AND FAMILY.’
- Wednesday Martin
Still, Martin says, she eventually “goes native” and buys into the culture, becoming a full-fledged participant in privileged Upper East Side daily life.
She says she attended grueling exercise classes at Physique 57 to lose her baby weight after her second son’s birth. But the upscale gym did not exist when she claims to have exercised there.
She also describes a posh party where the guests bring the hostess gifts from an upscale macaroon shop. But Ladurée didn’t open in New York until 2011, four years after she had moved.
While at a lunch date just prior to the party, Martin and a friend do an accounting of how much their over-privileged peers spend on personal grooming, clothing and transportation. Her friend refers to Uber, even though the car service didn’t debut in the city until 2011.
The eldest son attends the “fanciest” nursery school on the Upper East Side — a thinly veiled reference to the 92nd Street Y preschool. Martin describes feeling “euphoric” that he was accepted at a “good” school.
But while Martin needles over-privileged parents, records show that her husband sued the Y in 2013, saying their youngest son fell off the monkey bars at the school in March 2012 and suffered “severe and permanent injuries.”
Martin’s Instagram feed has numerous photos of the boy — on a kayak, swimming, playing, sliding down a giant carnival slide and jumping off a lifeguard tower in the Hamptons.
The suit, which doesn’t specify damages and is ongoing, blames the Y for failing to supervise the child and “failing to catch” him before he hit the ground. Martin told The Post that the suit is “pretty standard insurance-company stuff.”
In the book, Martin says her family leaves the Upper East Side after both sons are accepted to a school across town, even though one hadn’t been born yet.
‘SINCE THE BOOK IS ORGANIZED BY TOPIC (EX. REAL ESTATE, SOCIAL HIERARCHIES, EXERCISE), IT IS NOT ALWAYS A STRAIGHTFORWARD CHRONOLOGY.’
- Wednesday Martin
Public records show Martin and her husband, Joel Moser, sold their Park Avenue pad — at a $1 million profit — in June 2007, only 3¹/₂ years after arriving, not six. They moved to a $3.7 million co-op apartment on the Upper West Side.
Martin was actually pregnant during this house hunt. Her youngest boy was born a few months after the move.
In her muddled narrative, Martin writes that while living on the Upper East Side, she became pregnant at 43 with her third child. She confides she briefly considered aborting the pregnancy, only to go forward and miscarry in her sixth month.
In the book’s emotional climax, Martin describes how the Mean Girls she once thought “bitchy and off-putting” rallied around her with support and comfort.
Did this outpouring ever happen? At the time, Martin already would have been living across town, far from the women she derides on the Upper East Side.
Asked specifically about the timing of the miscarriage, Martin replied, “I am not going to answer questions about my health, reproductive health or choices, children, or private meetings.” She added: “Since the book is organized by topic (ex. real estate, social hierarchies, exercise), it is not always a straightforward chronology.”
Simon & Schuster, which published the book, declined to comment.
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