nurturing creativity

BY RUI MIAO

It’s almost impossible to associate Susan Fales-Hill with any other ZIP code. The glam and elegance she carries is decidedly Upper East Side. After all, she has been living there for 20 years.

She doesn’t hail from there, or from the city — or even from the United States. “Refugees from racism,” is how she described her parents: Josephine Premice, a Haitian-American Broadway actress, and Timothy Fales, a stockbroker from “an old, WASP family,” who moved to Rome after getting married in 1958. Fales-Hill was born in the Italian capital in 1962.

The family settled in Manhattan when she was 2, and Fales-Hill grew up steeped in the arts, history and literature on the Upper West Side — a “cocoon and wonderland” full of books, music and different cultures. “We didn’t go to things like Disneyland or McDonald’s, we went to the museums and theatres.”

As a teenager, Fales-Hill took the crosstown bus to attend the Lycée Français de New York; she then graduated from Harvard University with a degree in literature and history. She spent her 20s and early 30s as a television writer and producer, starting as a writer apprentice for the Cosby Show. As a New Yorker in Los Angeles, she worked long hours until her mother became ill. She would often return to New York to care for her mother. She also started writing her first book, a memoir, “Always Wear Joy: My Mother Bold and Beautiful.”

“She passed away in the middle of my writing it,” recalled Fales-Hill, who said writing helped her deal with the pain that her mother’s death brought. “It forced me to confront all the emotions ... by having to ‘live’ with her everyday and remember, it really helped process the loss.”

The book, published in 2003, kicked off her career as a writer. “One Flight Up: A Novel” and “Imperfect Bliss: A Novel” came along a few years later. Like many other New York writers drawn to the Upper East Side for its conviviality, Fales-Hill is grateful for this place where she can nurture her creativity.

“It is a real neighborhood,” she said. “That sense of cocoon that you can create of a home.”

Her go-to list includes, but is not limited to: Sant Ambroeus on 78th and Madison, which is her “little dose of Italy in New York”; for special occasions, she would take her daughter to the Carlyle, where she traces childhood memories with the legacy of family friend Bobby Short; Zitomer pharmacy on 76th and Madison — “they have everything”; when her eyes crave beautiful things, she would walk past the Ralph Lauren flagship store on 72nd Street near her high school; and of course, the Frick, The Met and Central Park.

“We are New Yorkers, we get around,” she said.

Fales-Hill has a penchant for art, and ballet is among her greatest loves. She’s a committed supporter of American Ballet Theatre, among other cultural institutions. The passion for the arts, inherited from her mother, is carried on within the family: her daughter went to her first ballet performance when she was 13 months.

“I wanted my daughter’s life to be equally rich in culture, and interesting,” said Fales-Hill. “So I’d chosen to do a lot of things with her that my mother did with me.”

Humble as she is, she’s an inspiration for young women, be it those who aspire to write, or those who struggle with their own identities.

“Be yourself,” she said. “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides. Take some time and really figure out what makes you happy ... you will get as much as you give.”