Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and analyzes the text’s depiction of abuse and discrimination against the elderly; death by suicide, racist violence, involuntary institutionalization for mental health; and the killing of animals.

Anderson Cooper met Brooke Astor in 1981, when she was the pinnacle of New York high society. Dressed in furs, she entered Mortimer’s—a fashionable dining spot of the day—while he ate there with his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. Both the Astors and Vanderbilts had dominated Gilded Age New York, yet these two heirs to high society differed. Brooke Astor reveled in her social status, whereas Gloria Vanderbilt wanted to make her own way and disapproved of Brooke.

A few years later, Anderson Cooper had a summer job as a waiter at Mortimer’s. Once again, he saw Brooke enter and greeted her by name. Brooke, seeing him in the uniform of a mere waiter, looked straight through him as though he wasn’t even there and walked on. That experience of social class stuck with Cooper. It made him think about what place he wanted in the world. As an adult, his research on his mother’s clan, which became the book

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