Suzannah Lessard Dies at 81; Memoirist and Stanford White Descendant
Suzannah Lessard, an author and longtime writer for The New Yorker whose best-selling memoir probed the fraught legacy of her great-grandfather, the Gilded Age architect Stanford White, died on Jan. 29 in Manhattan. She was 81. Her death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of endometrial cancer, Noel Brennan, her wife, said.
Lessard grew up on a rambling North Shore Long Island compound the family called “the Place,” much of it created by Mr. White, and lived in the 19th-century Red Cottage with her five sisters and their parents. The book traced the architecture and allure of that landscape back to darker histories: Mr.
White, who helped design Madison Square Garden, was fatally shot in 1906 by Harry K. Thaw after revelations that he had sexually assaulted Evelyn Nesbit when she was 16. Her memoir, The Architect of Desire, published in 1996 after decades of work, examined a family code of silence and its toll.