This Much I Know: Douglas Kennedy

"I grew up thinking that I’d never leave New York, it was my entire world, but I ended up in Ireland for 11 years"

Douglas Kennedy. Pic: Paul Stuart

I’m a mid-century American. I was born in 1955 and grew up in a 650-square-foot apartment in New York City, back when Manhattan had a middle-class. When I was nine years old I was accepted into the Collegiate School, probably the most academic of New York’s schools. They only take 45 boys each year and it was full of very wealthy children. 

John F Kennedy Jr was there, Leonard Bernstein’s son, the sons of the people who ran the Seagram company, and I was just this middle-class boy who got in. My father was of an Irish Catholic background and grew up in a working-class corner of Brooklyn and my mother was of German Jewish background and grew up in a lower-middle-class corner of Brooklyn called Flatbush.