From Manhattan apartments and famous restaurants to Playland, Belmont Park and the Hamptons, Buchanan’s memoir follows a childhood in which extraordinary privilege could not answer the simplest question: where did she belong?
Cat Buchanan remembers Manhattan in Girl in Flight not as a distant skyline but at street level, walking her standard poodle Charlie around East 64th Street while summer heat and steam rose from restaurants, subway vents and the pavement.
It is characteristic of Buchanan’s memoir. Grand places may frame the story, but the memories that remain are intimate, funny, and often painful.
After becoming bicoastal, Buchanan spent her childhood moving between Brentwood and Manhattan, separated by a three-hour time difference and 3,000 miles. The New York side of that life included wealth on a cinematic scale: East Side apartments, valuable art, private clubs, country weekends, and restaurants whose names belonged to an older Manhattan social world.
At Beekman Place, Buchanan describes her great aunt’s home as a private museum filled with Chippendale furniture, Renaissance art, French Impressionist paintings, Persian rugs, jade and silver. The Metropolitan and Manhattan clubs appear in the same family history, reinforcing a world where membership and status mattered.
A Personal Map of the East Coast
· East 64th Street: Buchanan’s Manhattan base and the setting for city adventures with her dog Charlie.
· Playland: The Dragon Coaster provided repeated bursts of adrenaline, including a 128-foot descent that Buchanan turns into the backdrop for childhood conflict with a girl she was forced to spend time with.
· Westchester and Rye: Country-club summers brought swimming, sports and social gatherings. Westchester Country Club facilitated activities during her father’s second divorce and expulsion from a former circle of close friends.
· Belmont Park: Horses became leverage in a much larger negotiation when Buchanan recalls her father offering to bribe her with the purchase of any two horses if she agreed to move East permanently.
· The Hamptons: An elegant setting in which Buchanan eventually becomes friends with someone she could understand, when heartbreak changes the dynamic between them.
· Lake Placid Club: The Adirondacks provide family tension when her father’s faulty values are exposed, along with hideous behavior exhibited by a cruel East Coast grandmother who resented her for having been adopted. Social observation and comedy are juxtaposed, including a memorable collision between her dog Charlie and a skunk.
Restaurants form another set of coordinates.
A Manhattan return is celebrated at Luchow’s, surrounded by Tiffany glass, marble and mahogany. At P.J. Clarke’s, Buchanan’s priorities are refreshingly straightforward: a Cadillac cheeseburger in preference for the fare on offer at Regency Whist Club.
After Charlie dies, her father suggests Benihana on West 56th Street, using dinner as an attempted antidote to grief. The Rainbow Room and Stork Club add still more old-Manhattan texture.
These famous names matter because of the contrast they create.
Girl in Flight places extraordinary material privilege beside the emotional uncertainty Buchanan experienced as a child. Belmont Park captures that contradiction particularly well. For a horse-obsessed girl, an offer of two thoroughbreds sounds almost irresistible. Yet the real question is whether possessions can determine where someone belongs and where real loyalty lies.
Buchanan’s answer unfolds gradually.
This is not a misery memoir. Difficult memories are repeatedly punctuated by roller coasters, dogs, horses, restaurants, and a delightful mix of early remembrance and adult wit used to expose a comic interpretation of adult behavior. Trauma may provide tension, but humor and momentum define the narrative.
That gives Girl in Flight a visual, fast-moving quality. Manhattan apartments cut to racetracks, country clubs to airports, roller coasters to restaurant tables, and New York summers back to California.
The final destination is emotional rather than geographic.
Buchanan’s later search for connection eventually leads to a reunion with her half-sister. She describes it as a “happy Hollywood ending”, an ending based not on recovering the past but on discovering that something meaningful could still come from it.
With its rapid shifts between Manhattan apartments, racetracks, restaurants, country clubs and cross-country flights, the memoir has a visceral cinematic quality that’s ripe for screen adaptation.
Published by Woodbridge Publishers, Girl in Flight is available in Kindle, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook formats. Buchanan narrates the audiobook herself.
