This memoir evokes a girl's coming of age in a postwar New York City planned, "utopian" community.

Eleven Stories High is a memoir of a middle-class New York childhood, the perceptions of a girl growing up in a housing project that she deemed a "utopia of the fifties." The story follows the process of memory, rather than the conventions of chronology, and explores the concept of "home," how a place like Stuyvesant Town-impersonal, symmetrical, utilitarian-shapes a childhood.