Before Arlene Eisenberg and her two daughters created the 1984 question-and-answer pregnancy bible What to Expect When You’re Expecting, she was an empty-nester. Her kids lived in Manhattan. Her husband, Howard, commuted to New Jersey. And she couldn’t drive. Why was she still in the suburbs?
Could they afford Manhattan?
In 1980, parts of the Upper West Side still felt “sketchy,” remembered their son, Evan Eisenberg. But they liked the idea of being close to a Jewish community. And the location made sense for Howard’s commute: He could zip onto the West Side Highway from 79th.
They paid $350,000 — or $1.4 million today — for 144 West 80th, a rental building with five stories. The grand, 20-foot-wide Renaissance Revival had been built in 1890 as part of a row, just off the American Museum of Natural History. It was teeming with lovely detail — a curving, dog-leg staircase led to a grand oak-and-glass door, capped with a triangular pediment. Windows at the parlor level were arched, and above them, whimsical figures were carved in relief: a moth with the head of a man, a pair of dragonlike creatures licking at a fruit bowl. Early owners had been the kind of prosperous families who weren’t posh enough for Fifth Avenue — a partner in a telephone company, a president of a chemical manufacturer. But renters soon followed, and by 1969, the building was split into five: two one-bedrooms on the top floor, two floor-throughs below, and an owner’s duplex on the bottom.
How does a family with adult kids share a rental building?
Arlene and Howard Eisenberg took the duplex because they loved places with patina. There were exposed-brick walls, and a dining room with a fireplace, wood wainscoting, and a parquet floor. The newel post at the foot of the wide staircase was carved with the head of a lion. And there was a yard big enough for a sukkah.
Upstairs, a rotating cast of renters — including their children — took simpler, smaller units. “We were happy to live in the same building with them — in separate apartments of course” said Evan, who arrived in 1982 and stayed for years, starting in a one-bedroom on the top floor. Eventually, his fiancée, Freda, moved in and they married in front of the dining-room fireplace. Arlene and Howard’s daughter Heidi had been in a one-bedroom. Then she moved out. Then she moved back in, this time to a floor-through. She needed the space. Plus it would be convenient to be near her writing partner.
Who was her writing partner?
By 1982, Heidi and Arlene had already written together, publishing a cookbook. They weren’t the first two in the family to team up and write something together.
Howard and Arlene first met when he was a publicist (for Birdland and the heartthrob singer Eddie Fisher). Together, they became journalists — writing articles under shared bylines for The Ladies’ Home Journal, Sports Illustrated, and McCalls. Their kids Evan and Heidi had a knack, too, and eventually, the family was recruited for a new magazine called Kosher Home (later Jewish Living), which forced them to adopt pseudonyms so the masthead wouldn’t be an embarrassment of Eisenbergs. Evan became a professional writer, occasionally sharing bylines with his father and, later, his wife. (Their work also appeared in this magazine.)
The townhouse became the place where everyone wrote books that would end up filling most of a bookcase in the living room, devoted to the Eisenberg-family output. Howard would later become best known for The Recovery Book, a guide for addicts. As a renter upstairs, Evan wrote The Recording Angel, a critically adored study of the history of recorded music with a foreword that thanked his parents for “marathon typing.”
But why a pregnancy book?
Heidi’s idea for What to Expect was simple. When she was pregnant, she noticed a gap in the market for good, relatable content about pregnancy. Arlene had been filing articles on health, and her other daughter, Sandee, had become a nurse. The book they wrote together came out in 1984. It sold steadily, then kept selling to expectant parents who had the kind of low-stakes questions you might not bother calling a doctor about — or have the time to research.
By 1999, a survey found 93 percent of pregnant people or recent parents had read the first book. Eventually, it launched an entire line — What to Expect the First Year, What to Eat When You’re Expecting. With 40 million copies sold, it’s now the highest-selling parenting series of all time. These days, though, it’s probably better known through an app (No. 16 in the medical category) that guides parents week by week: At “7 weeks, 5 days … baby is as big as a blueberry.”
Did they continue to live together?
Eight years after What to Expect came out, Heidi and her husband combined the two floor-through apartments into a duplex with two bedrooms for their kids off a playroom. On the lower floor were the living spaces, and a fourth bedroom that could be accessed off the main stairway, making it ideal for a nanny or a guest.
The parlor floor of the family of writers was often tapped for the book parties of friends — a living area flowed into a dining room and out into the backyard, enough space for hundreds of people. Arlene became involved at Ansche Chesed on 100th Street and hosted other members for dinner. Which is how the family ended up meeting Isaac Bashevis Singer’s translator, who once brought the author along for one of Arlene’s famous dinners. “Evan’s mother was the kind of personality where she was like a mother to everyone,” said Freda. “She was a sort of domestic queen who could write best sellers and make a Seder for 30 people.”
The couple had moved out in the late 1980s, heading for a quieter life in western Massachusetts. But when Arlene was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1990s, they moved back in, taking over the duplex. They had a daughter — an energetic 2-year-old who could rouse Arlene. But it was still a lot of space for them. When Arlene’s part-time assistant, Ana Milosavljevic, confided that she needed to find a new apartment, they offered her the detached guest room, for which she paid “some symbolic rent,” she remembered. Ana was then a graduate student of composition and performance at the New School. When she had her solo debut at Carnegie Hall, Freda designed the flyers and hosted the after-party. “They were so open and generous and kind.”
Arlene died in 2001. Howard mourned her, co-writing a 2009 book about the travails of dating later in life. During the pandemic, he was cheered by another Eisenberg renter when Evan and Freda’s 24-year-old daughter moved back in, helping him get groceries.
“Every Eisenberg has lived in that building at one time or another,” Evan said. But it’s been years since any of the siblings lived in the state, and cousins and uncles are no longer calling to crash for a weekend. Howard died in 2022, leaving Evan to clean out his office. “There were poems falling like confetti from every shelf and cubby hole.”
