In response to this story, publisher Simon & Schuster said Sunday they would add a disclaimer to the book. 
 
 It’s the book everyone on the Upper East Side is talking about. But is “Primates of Park Avenue,” an exposé on the moneyed mommies of Manhattan, really true? 
 
 A Post review of the best seller found holes big enough to drive an Escalade through. 
 
 Author Wednesday Martin — whose real first name is Wendy — claims in the memoir to have spent six years “doing field work” with her two kids on the Upper East Side conducting an armchair anthropological study. 
 
 But Martin only lived there for three years, with one kid, and mentions stores and services that didn’t exist, calling into question the scenes and ­behaviors she describes. 
 
 “Primates” includes eyebrow-raising anecdotes, such as the claim that some women receive yearly “wife bonuses.” After readers expressed doubt, Martin backpedaled, telling New York magazine: “I don’t necessarily think it’s a trend or widespread. It was just one of the many strange-seeming cultural practices that some women told me about.” 
 
 Although the book includes no such disclaimer and is advertised as a “memoir,” Martin told The Post she “telescoped certain parts of the narrative in order to protect the privacy of friends, neighbors, associates and family.” 
 
 That “telescoping” seems to have moved events that happened in different neighborhoods and put them on the Upper East Side. 
 
 In the book, Martin says she and her husband moved from the West Village for her toddler son. She describes being forced to undergo an unusual interview to purchase her Park Avenue abode. 
 
 The co-op board, she says, held the interrogation in her bedroom, where she was confined because of a difficult pregnancy. She wears a strand of pearls while propped up in bed, the board members gathered around her. 
 
 It’s an amusing scene. 
 
 Except, while property rec­ords show she and her husband bought an apartment at 900 Park Ave. in January 2004, she does not appear to have been pregnant at the time. 
 
 Martin’s first son was born in 2001 and her second was born in 2007 — the year she moved from the Upper East Side to the Upper West Side. 
 
 Throughout the book, she claims to have been raising two boys on the Upper East Side. They are her supposed entree into the world of play dates and tutors. 
 
 Martin said she was shunned by the “Mean Girl Moms” who looked down on her as an outsider. 
 
 I telescoped certain parts of the narrative in order to protect the privacy of friends, neighbors, associates and family. - Wednesday Martin 
 
 Still, Martin says, she eventually “goes native” and buys into the culture, becoming a full-fledged participant in privileged Upper East Side daily life. 
 
 She says she attended grueling exercise classes at Physique 57 to lose her baby weight after her second son’s birth. But the upscale gym did not exist when she claims to have exercised there. 
 
 She also describes a posh party where the guests bring the hostess gifts from an upscale macaroon shop. But Ladurée didn’t open in New York until 2011, four years after she had moved. 
 
 While at a lunch date just prior to the party, Martin and a friend do an accounting of how much their over-privileged peers spend on personal grooming, clothing and transportation. Her friend refers to Uber, even though the car service didn’t debut in the city until 2011. 
 
 The eldest son attends the “fanciest” nursery school on the Upper East Side — a thinly veiled reference to the 92nd Street Y preschool. Martin describes feeling “euphoric” that he was ­accepted at a “good” school. 
 
 But while Martin needles over-privileged parents, records show that her husband sued the Y in 2013, saying their younger son fell off the monkey bars at the school in March 2012 and suffered “severe and permanent injuries.” 
 
 Martin’s Instagram feed has numerous photos of the boy — on a kayak, swimming, playing, sliding down a giant carnival slide and jumping off a lifeguard tower in the Hamptons. 
 
 The suit, which doesn’t specify damages and is ongoing, blames the Y for failing to supervise the child and “failing to catch” him before he hit the ground. Martin told The Post that the suit is “pretty standard insurance-company stuff.” 
 
 In the book, Martin says her family leaves the Upper East Side after both sons are accepted to a school across town, even though one hadn’t been born yet. 
 
 Since the book is organized by topic (ex. real estate, social hierarchies, exercise), it is not always a straightforward chronology. - Wednesday Martin 
 
 Public records show Martin and her husband, Joel Moser, sold their Park Avenue pad — at a $1 million profit — in June 2007, only 3½ years after arriving, not six. They moved to a $3.7 million co-op apartment on the Upper West Side. 
 
 Martin was actually pregnant during this house hunt. Her younger boy was born a few months after the move. 
 
 In her muddled narrative, Martin writes that while living on the Upper East Side, she became pregnant at 43 with her third child. She confides she briefly considered aborting the pregnancy, only to go forward and miscarry in her sixth month. 
 
 In the book’s emotional climax, Martin describes how the Mean Girls she once thought “bitchy and off-putting” rallied around her with support and comfort. 
 
 Did this outpouring ever happen? At the time, Martin already would have been living across town, far from the women she derides on the Upper East Side. 
 
 Asked specifically about the timing of the miscarriage, Martin replied, “I am not going to answer questions about my health, reproductive health or choices, children, or private meetings.” She added: “Since the book is organized by topic (ex. real estate, social hierarchies, exercise), it is not always a straightforward chronology.” 
 
 Simon & Schuster, which published the book, declined to comment. ||||| "An eye-popping insider's guide." – People 
 
 “An amusing, perceptive and, at times thrillingly evil takedown of upper-class culture by an outsider with a front-row seat…Martin’s writing is confident and evocative…Her reading of the fashion attire of real estate brokers for ‘triple mint’ apartments is brilliant…at a time when a social comedy of the rich a la Tom Wolfe has been lost in national discourse…it’s fun to dip into a sophisticated, if silly, look at the Upper East Side’s Twilight Zone. Primates of Park Avenue is also a good reminder that as much as we may envy the wealthy, they fight every day for a place in their own social hierarchy, too.” – New York Times Book Review 
 
 "Juicy, sexy, bawdy stuff...the perfect summer beach book...the tasty tome we'll all be devouring when the weather warms." – New York Daily News 
 
 “Applying the chimpanzee research of Jane Goodall or the observations of bonobos by Frans de Waal to one's neighbors and co-workers is great fun…Martin rewards those of us in humbler circumstances the undeniably pleasant frisson of superiority that comes with finding fault with those better endowed financially, socially, sartorially.” – Chicago Tribune 
 
 "Think privileged NYC wives are another species? Martin goes undercover in this dishy memoir and reminds us that we all have something in common." – Glamour 
 
 "Hysterical and cutting." – Harper's Bazaar 
 
 "Think: Gossip Girl, but with a sociological study of the parents." – InStyle.com 
 
 “Put this book at the top of your summer reading list!...astute and entertaining.” – Miami Living 
 
 "Amusing...incisive...a wryly entertaining guide to this rarefied subculture." – The Economist 
 
 "Recalls Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique…Primates is pacy and skillfully weaves cultural insight with personal anecdote…This is an intriguing insight into a closed world. It is easy to dismiss the subjects as frivolous and mean, which many seem to be. But our envy and schadenfreude makes the rich a compelling curiosity.” – Financial Times 
 
 “Fascinating…The author has a Ph.D. and a background in anthropology and primatology, so it’s not long before she’s analyzing her fellow mommies in terms of what she knows about olive baboons. The book is at its best when Martin analyzes her population this way. Comparing a group of women to primates, their family planning to those of birds, their interactions with men to groups of mice—these make for compelling insights…Engrossing.” – The AV Club 
 
 “Picture ‘Real Housewives,’ add in pop-science, and you have Wednesday Martin’s new book.” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 
 
 “A very funny, and slightly scary, look at the denizens of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.” – Connecticut Post 
 
 "Any population is fair game for anthropological research, so why not the super-rich, super-thin, and oh-so-well-dressed mothers of New York's Upper East Side?... Illuminating and fun." – BookPage 
 
 “Martin puts her academic background (anthropology classes and a doctorate in cultural studies) to witty good use in describing this wealthy tribe’s extremes…it became clear to me, reading Martin’s book, that our Bay Area tribes aren’t so different from those of New York.” – San Francisco Chronicle 
 
 A Jane Goodall wielding an American Express Black Card, the author leads readers through the hierarchical benchmarks of Upper East Side mothers. This anthropological journey into the wilds of New York City’s most exclusive zip code could have easily devolved into condescension, but instead it proves that mothers everywhere want the same thing: health and happiness for their progeny. – Library Journal, starred review 
 
 "I absolutely loved this memoir and could not put it down! It's incredibly clever; Martin uses anthropology to analyze Upper East mothers, and it's astonishingly illuminating. Somehow, Martin manages to be caustically perceptive but also generous, funny, moving, and erudite all at the same time. This is one of the most fascinating books I've read in a long time." – Amy Chua, Yale Law Professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and The Triple Package 
 
 If anthropologist Jane Goodall had landed on Park Avenue with a Birkin bag instead of the wilds of Tanzania with a notebook, this is the book she would have written. Primates of Park Avenue is a smart, funny, and original dissection of the tribal rites of rich and striving New Yorkers as they migrate between Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the Hamptons. – Steven Gaines, author of Philistines at the Hedgerow 
 
 “I am a huge fan of everything Wednesday Martin writes - her astute observations are filled with wisdom and humor, and more than once have helped me see the world through different eyes.” – Jane Green, New York Times bestselling author of Saving Grace 
 
 “People aiming to study primates in the wild are carefully taught to avoid anthropomorphism. Reading human motivation into the behavior of free-living primates is a no-no. But what about using information from primate field studies to interpret human behavior “chimpomorphically”? Confronted with the need to cope with sociopathological conditions on New York’s ultra-wealthy Upper East Side, Wednesday Martin delved deeply into her knowledge of primate behavior. The result is this book in which primatology leads to a deeper understanding of the human hearts that beat beneath their designer-clad exteriors. A tour de force” – Robert Martin, Ph.D., Professor of Biological Anthropology and Curator Emeritus, Field Museum of Chicago and author of How We Do It: the Evolution and Future of Human Reproduction 
 
 "When mean girls and wannabes grow up, they become the women so perfectly depicted in Wednesday Martin's funny and intelligent memoir. How wonderful that she survived the jungle of Park Avenue with strong female friendships intact." – Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes 
 
 "Dr. Wednesday Martin is a genius. This book is a must for anyone fascinated by people, trends, and tribes." – Lucy Sykes, author of The Knockoff ||||| “We prefer it,” the men told me at a dinner party where husbands and wives sat at entirely different tables in entirely different rooms. 
 
 Sex segregation, I was told, was a “choice.” But like “choosing” not to work, or a Dogon woman in Mali’s “choosing” to go into a menstrual hut, it struck me as a state of affairs possibly giving clue to some deeper, meaningful reality while masquerading, like a reveler at the Save Venice ball the women attended every spring, as a simple preference. 
 
 And then there were the wife bonuses. 
 
 I was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a “bonus” over coffee. Later I overheard someone who didn’t work say she would buy a table at an event once her bonus was set. A woman with a business degree but no job mentioned waiting for her “year-end” to shop for clothing. Further probing revealed that the annual wife bonus was not an uncommon practice in this tribe. 
 
 A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting. 
 
 Women who didn’t get them joked about possible sexual performance metrics. Women who received them usually retreated, demurring when pressed to discuss it further, proof to an anthropologist that a topic is taboo, culturally loaded and dense with meaning. 
 
 But what exactly did the wife bonus mean? It made sense only in the context of the rigidly gendered social lives of the women I studied. The worldwide ethnographic data is clear: The more stratified and hierarchical the society, and the more sex segregated, the lower the status of women. 
 
 Financially successful men in Manhattan sit on major boards — of hospitals, universities and high-profile diseases, boards whose members must raise or give $150,000 and more. The wives I observed are usually on lesser boards, women’s committees and museums in the outer boroughs with annual expectations of $5,000 or $10,000. Husbands are trustees of prestigious private schools, where they accrue the cultural capital that comes with being able to vouch for others in the admissions game; their wives are “class moms,” the unremunerated social and communications hub for all the other mothers. ||||| If I had relied on morning show blurbs to summarize Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir, I would have thought it was all about wife bonuses. In actuality, “wife bonuses” are mentioned in one paragraph on one page of a 242-page book (page 161 to be exact). 
 
 
 
 I have now read all of the other paragraphs on all of the other 242 pages. I read the book because a friend plans to read it and discuss, so I invited myself along for the discussion and rapidly read the book while on vacation. 
 
 
 
 I found myself skeptical, entertained, and bereft. 
 
 
 
 Skeptical 
 
 
 
 The author presents the book as an academically/sociologically based analysis of life among the female spouses of ultra-wealthy Upper East Side Manhattan men who could claim to be part of the “1%.” 
 
 
 
 I will be the first to say I have never traveled in the circles of that 1%. My handbags usually come from Target, as opposed to Hermès. In my thirty-four months in New York City, I relied on my feet or mass transit to get me from Point A to Point B rather than car services. I do not doubt the degree of excess the author describes in this book, but I doubt that anyone who is part of that world will ever willingly participate in publicizing the specifics.I am skeptical that the particular excesses the author chose to highlight really represent that world accurately. 
 
 
 
 I also must mention the discussions of exercise classes at Physique 57 and SoulCycle. The author uses these two examples of cultish “subtribes” to demonstrate how the Primates of Park Avenue subject themselves to “grueling group endurance rites” in order to maintain their appearance. Again, I have never been part of that world but have observed the following in Manhattan: 
 
 
 
 1) When I took step aerobics there in the early 90s, everything about the classes I participated in was tightly structured. When you walked in, you had to sign up for a spot, and if you were “spot 35,” you didn’t want to wander into spot 36’s bubble. But that comes with the territory of how space is regulated in Manhattan; it is always at a premium and you just learn to deal. It wasn’t that business’s way of being elitist. 
 
 
 
 2) While I have only taken one SoulCycle class ever, it was on the Upper East Side. It was a great experience, but I have a hard time seeing how the environment I experienced there would ever transmute into one where we participants “hooted like subversive rappers and called one another ‘thug’.” (And it must be noted I was wearing tights from Marshall’s that I had bought on clearance …… at a SoulCycle Class …… on the Upper East Side. Just call me blasphemous :-). 
 
 
 
 My skepticism is bolstered by the fact that the publisher appended future editions of the book following The New York Post’s fact checking (which had at least one inaccuracy of its own) to clarify the fact that some of the memoir’s details and chronologies had been changed. 
 
 
 
 Entertained 
 
 
 
 Once I shifted the book in my head from “non-fiction” to “possibly revised piece of writing based on the author’s interpretation of events,” I was able to just revel in the New York-ness of it all! New York City is my favorite place, my “happy place,” and the almost-three-years I spent there were life changers in every way. Although the New York City the author described apparently took place in expensive luxury abodes protected by building staff from mortals like the rest of us, I managed to see glimpses of it. I saw the nannies pushing babies/children around in their expensive strollers; I saw the opulent furs and jewelry; I saw hints of a lifestyle worlds apart from my own. Ironically, the building where I rented a room (with my own bathroom, which was a BIG DEAL in late 80s New York City), had a manned elevator, with a staff person who operated the elevator to my apartment on the 17th floor. (That worked out great except for the time I arrived home from a trip, suitcase in hand, to learn that the workers were all on strike. That was a long trip up 17 flights of stairs, suitcase in hand!). 
 
 
 
 Bereft 
 
 
 
 NOTE: There is a little bit of a spoiler in the next paragraph. 
 
 
 
 A critical shift in the author’s relationships with her Upper East Side peers occurred when she found herself unexpectedly pregnant at the age of 43. 
 
 
 
 At first, she was going to abort the baby, then she decided she wanted to keep the baby. At around six months of gestation, the fetus developed severe issues that resulted in the author having a surgical procedure to remove it (I assume a D&C; type of procedure) and proceeding to grieve the loss of her daughter. 
 
 
 
 In the course of grieving this loss, she discovered that some of the women who had previously been the most cold and haughty turned out to be warm, supportive, and empathic. 
 
 
 
 This chapter threw me into so many emotions, many not because of the author but because of the topic. My third and fourth pregnancies ended when the embryos failed to develop, resulting in D&C; procedures to end the pregnancies. Future efforts to have a third child ended when my body (surprise!) decided to go into menopause at age 43. Therefore, this is a complex topic for me. 
 
 
 
 While of course I support a woman’s right to choose, I would be lying if I didn’t share that my absolute first thought was, “but she was so LUCKY to get pregnant at 43,” and to be sad that she was going to end it. 
 
 
 
 Then I cheered her on as she decided to keep the baby, who she was going to name Daphne, and I grieved with her as she went through the agonizing medical procedures related to the way the pregnancy ended, and the even deeper agony of dealing with her emotions. Having post-pregnancy hormones without the compensating joy of a newborn is like being on an emotional tightwire, for sure. I don’t envy any woman who has to do that. 
 
 
 
 As she noted, when something like this happens to you, people come out of the woodwork who previously had appeared to have perfect lives. You find allies you would not have anticipated, and you learn to cut others a break. That part of the book I loved. 
 
 
 
 Final Thoughts 
 
 
 
 Here’s the thing: I struggled with the whole premise. The author and her husband wanted to move to the Upper East Side from the Village because they felt so committed to public schooling for their child, who was still an infant, that they “wanted to be in the best school district.” Given that the next chapter was dedicated to her total panic that he wasn’t registered for a prestigious preschool yet, and the reference to the fact that these preschools were critical to getting into the right private schools, I felt disconnect about that from the get-go. 
 
 
 
 First of all, as a public school product, married to another public school product, who successfully raised one public school graduate who is navigating college successfully and who is quasi-successfully raising a public school eleventh-grader (fingers crossed on that one), there are many more decent public schools in this country than the one in the 10021 zip code. MANY. Then she ends the book by saying (and I am paraphrasing) “well, the boys ended up getting accepted to schools on the Upper West Side so we moved there” which left me wondering “then why the heck did you go through all those contortions (not to mention the outlay of so many millions of dollars and all the emotional trauma of getting “charged” (see page 80) by these ‘primates’)”? 
 
 
 
 The author writes, “If childhood is unusual here, motherhood is beyond bizarre. I learned firsthand about the “gets” that define life for the privileged and perfect women with children I lived among.” 
 
 
 
 Although I may crave the occasional splurge and have never had exactly what I dreamed about in the way of wardrobe or ability to travel, I know the “gets” I received from almost three years in NYC had everything to do with what I saw and learned mixing with all kinds of people, in all kinds of places … these “gets” cost no more than the willingness to walk city block after city block or buy a bus or subway token. Something tells me those were the best “gets” of all.
– In its description of a highly publicized exposé on Upper East Side housewives, publishing giant Simon & Schuster notes that author Wednesday Martin compares "mothers’ snobbiness at school drop-off ... to olive baboons." Now, less than a week after the publication of Primates of Park Avenue, the New York Post claims Martin's facts are the real monkey business—and the New York Times reports her publisher plans to add a "clarifying note" to future copies of the memoir. The Post outlines a number of assertions in the book that it says don't hold up. Among them: Martin writes that she lived on Park Avenue with her two children for six years; the Post contends that she lived there with one child for three-and-a-half years, selling the apartment in 2007. The book also describes Martin working out at Physique 57, but the fancy gym didn’t exist during the quoted time period. The same problem exists with references to desserts shop Ladurée and Uber, both of which came to the city in 2011. Martin tells the Post that "since the book is organized by topic (ex. real estate, social hierarchies, exercise), it is not always a straightforward chronology." Her publisher backs that up: "It is a common narrative technique in memoirs for some names, identifying characteristics, and chronologies to be adjusted or disguised," Simon & Schuster's VP tells the Times; she says future editions and e-books will get a "clarifying note." The Times reports that it ran an op-ed from Martin on her experience last month, and quotes this line from it: "I stuck to the facts."