NEW YORK – As anyone will tell you, family matters, and perhaps never more so than when it comes to a first novel.
Consider writer and producer Galt Niederhoffer’s new book, “A Taxonomy of Barnacles,” out now from St. Martin’s Press.
A romantic and screwball family comedy set on the Upper East Side, it follows the six physically blessed and gifted Barnacle sisters as they compete for the favor and inheritance of their eccentric father. Divided into two parts, “Nature” and “Nurture,” the book is rife with quirky touches: Chapters have titles such as “Well-Defined Lips” and “Killer Backhand,” and the characters’ names all begin with the letter B – Bubbles, Bell, Bunny, Beryl, to name a few.
It is a scenario with which Niederhoffer is somewhat familiar, having grown up on Park Avenue, the eldest of six girls, four of whom were half-sisters. Her father is Victor Niederhoffer, a well-known, successful and highly unconventional trader who didn’t wear shoes in his office and is known for making financial speculations based on disparate trends, claiming he could find a correlation between share prices and musical scores.
“You know, I wrote a whimsical, farcical novel because I wanted to hide from the darkness of my inner life,” she explains over a citron chaud at one of her local Chelsea haunts, Le Granne. “I made a conscious effort to distance from the sadness and depression. I do think this whimsically dysfunctional family is a way of kind of rewriting the more painful parts of my past, which no one needs to hear about.”
At 30, Niederhoffer already has weathered her fair share of cutthroat situations. While a junior at Harvard, where she majored in English and art history, she took a semester off to intern on a film and later became a producer on “Hurricane Streets.” The movie won awards and praise at Sundance and a semester turned into five years. As she learned about the business, she founded a production company.
It was upon her return to Harvard at 25, to finish her remaining three semesters, that Niederhoffer succeeded in fulfilling her longtime goal of completing a book. “While I was working in film in the city I’d written another novel, which I ended up putting in a drawer,” she says wryly. Inspired by Jane Austen and a class on Darwin (she was actually named for his cousin and science contemporary, Francis Galton), Niederhoffer found the perfect fictional structure in which to relate her idiosyncratic upbringing.
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The publication of “Taxonomy” now finds her multitasking as a writer and producer in a balancing act that is not as free-flowing as it might seem.
“I feel like they’re very separate worlds for me,” says Niederhoffer of her fiction and film sides (she is a partner in Plum Pictures with Daniela Taplin and Celine Rattray). “As a producer, it’s a very different part of my brain than I use as a writer. A producer is like a social animal, an orchestrator, a planner, a manager. It involves dealing with people in a way that is often very maddening and can be exhilarating. For me, writing is a very solitary thing. And I think I’m naturally more of a solitary person.”
There are times, though, when her two sides converge. Niederhoffer is already at work on her next novel, a satirical look at the world of indie film.
“The heroine is a pregnant woman who is dealing with a psychotic director,” she explains.
Realizing the possible implications of this description, she quickly adds: “But the last director I worked with, Steve Buscemi (on the upcoming “Lonesome Jim”) is a prince. Unfortunately, I’ve worked with all too many psychotic directors.”