Meanwhile, how perfect is this? I forgot to blog about my forgotten book, after Sandra Scoppetone tagged me. This is the brainchild of Patti Abbott. (although, come to think of it, isn’t Megan Abbott the brainchild of Patti Abbott? Belated congrats on the much-deserved Edgar (r) win.)
Anyway, my choice is A NOVEL CALLED HERITAGE. A little dated, in its way, as the story would now be told through emails, no doubt. And its mix of memoir and correspondence may seem less fresh than it did. But I love this book, by Margaret Dukore, because of its ceaseless use of the writer’s (cruel, self-interested, indefensible, nevertheless essential) creed: Use it.
To say more would be to put a finger to a soap bubble. I read the novel because my sister, a bookstore employee, gave me a stripped copy. I plunged in with nothing more than the back-cover copy. A young girl is writing the story of her life. That’s all you need to know. “Use it,” is her mother’s advice. The fact that mom is self-involved and self-destructive doesn’t make her advice any less wise.
Just this week, I took a peculiar if innocuous habit of a family member and grafted it on someone in a novel, who happens to have the same relationship to the main character in the novel as this family member has to me. Yet the character and the person have nothing else in common. In fact, they are MILES apart. Galaxies apart. Night-and-day apart. How does one defend that? Got me. The act of being a writer frequently seems indefensible to me. I won’t go so far as to declare that a writer is always selling someone out. But, hey, it’s truer more often than not.
Of course, as I’ve said before: The person the writer sells out is usually the writer.
I got it thanks a million. This is forgotten for me. I never knew how poorly read I was until I started this.
My forgotten book falls in the ‘so bad it’s good’ category. ”I had Wild Jack for a Lover”, Meredith Marsh, 1977 purchased by a 15 year old me from the Northfield Drugs paperback rack.
The title, a quote from Yeat’s ‘Crazy Jane On God’, gave the book some cachet after I pompously explained who Yeats was to numerous bored classmates, family members and neighbors. Any intellectual prestige I hoped to confer on myself was immediately destroyed by a glance at the God awful cover.
A shameless”Fear Of Flying’ rip off featuring a half zipped jump-suited thirtysomething’s torso, (so obviously not belonging to the 19 year old narrator) Her throat nuzzled and her bare breast cupped by a darkly exotic guy that’s probably supposed to suggest the Israeli Ari who flowers the bud of her womanhood, hoes her secret garden, just go ahead and make up your own cringe-y metaphor.
Sort of a mishmash of Peyton Place, Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks and a Rosemary Rogers for ladies porn pot boiler, the now out of print novel enthralled me as a teen and made enough of an impress that when I finally did go to college, I was an art major though at fourth tier Southern Illinois University, not Bennington.
Here’s a Kirkus review from the time that negates its superior, sardonic tone by actually using the word ”cocksman.”
<i>This teener fantasy, based on the assumption that a girl’s troubles can be straightened out by prolonged rolls in the hay (or in this case the bathtub and bed) with a major cocksman, will supply the pull of recognition to any such daydreamer who can put up with some fairly doopy-do dialogue. Bennington freshman, nice WASP Hannah from Jersey, who responded to her drunk father’s abuse and her mother’s weakness by dating the sexually dull Town Delinquent, now finds that demon-lover, Israeli actor Art cab truly open doors–beginning with hitherto numb Gate I. “”He had seemed somehow to touch all of her with all of him so that she could find no opportunity to, as the newspaper advisers put it, draw the line.”" Art: “”I will see you again, lovely child-woman?”" Yes, yes, through a school holiday in Art’s New York apartment, tumbling and plunging and bubbling together. But Art has a harem and “”a man who ravishes women for a temple, won’t settle for a home.”" So wise Hannah surrenders not to Art whose charm delights her, but to Forces Bigger Than Herself–which give her the distance and perspective to respect her parents as individuals and herself As A Woman. Set in 1963 and seeming even hoarier than that, this may attract a few for whom Love Story was hot stuff–but in the Fifties it could have been a real garter-snapper</i>
Kim, you crack me up. I laughed out loud at that review!
“…although, come to think of it, isn’t Megan Abbott the brainchild of Patti Abbott?”
Good one! So true.
Sounds like an interesting book. I’ll check it out.
This, and the previous post, have struck major chords with me, Laura. That shouldn’t surprise either of us. I am learning to let some things go and learning to enjoy little things, like the gerber daisies under the window and my new mailbox.
My book has been foundering in the shallows, but my daughter has been steady, and that is a blessing. I haven’t been reading, or posting, as much as I would like, and that’s a trade-off, one that I’m happy to negotiate.
But I will always be grateful that I’ve been embraced by this community because of one novel and a blog. That is a blessing more valuable than I can say.