TEEN TROUBLE

This was one of my favorite books of 2005. I'll be an uncle soon, and I can only hope that my sister won't ever drop a time bomb like Tiffany on my doorstep.

Breakfast with Tiffany by Edwin John Wintle
(Miramax Books, $24.95 Hardcover)

*Note to penny pinchers: The paperback edition will be available for $13.95 starting June 14th.

Leave it to a queen to name his memoir after an Audrey Hepburn movie. Though it would have cost him a wistful “Moon River” reference, Edwin John Wintle could just as easily have borrowed another famous title and called his book The Odd Couple.
Either way, this is a touching and hilarious book for all you parents out there, or for folks who are crazy enough to even think of dipping their toes into the choppy waters of child rearing.
Breakfast with Tiffany chronicles a year in the life of Wintle and his thirteen-year niece, called Tiffany in the book for privacy issues. Wintle, a former actor and lawyer, has settled into his 40s with a successful career negotiating book deals for an unnamed film company. No longer the oversexed party boy he used to be, he stashes away his porn collection and opens his Greenwich Village apartment to his niece for the 2002-2003 school year.
Tiffany, you see, is a bit of a wild child. Though she’s very intelligent and a talented singer, she has dead-end friends and she flunks most of her classes. Her mother, asks Wintle to be a strict-but-lovable role model for a year, in hopes that Tiff will excel in academics and the arts, and learn some civilized manners to boot.
Wintle, who used to get along swimmingly with his niece, must accept the sad fact that he can’t be Tiffany’s best friend and a conscientious guardian at the same time: “I knew that most of the time she saw me as her adversary. Gone was the uncle she’d once idolized, replaced now by this uptight, controlling man whose mission in life was to deprive her of everything that makes her happy.”
Disappointingly, Breakfast with Tiffany is windy and sappy in the last 50 pages or so. And for perplexing reasons, Wintle does not disclose significant details about his personal life until the final chapters.
But overall this is a very satisfying memoir that invites comparisons to the addictive escapades of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs.