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Category Archives: Chanel Bonfire

Babycham Monday

September 16, 2013

Like Champagne for Little Girls!

When the IRA was bombing London and a couple of threats were called in to our school (The American School in London) we had to evacuate and so went to the pub nearby and tried, with the biggest platform shoes and the greatest amount of lipstick, to look old enough to order Babycham, Sparkling Perry.

Originally called “Champagne Perry”, Babycham was invented by brewer Francis Edwin Showering in Shepton Mallet, Sommerset, England.After the French complained about the use of the appelation Champagne, the name was changed to “Sparkling”. Perry is an ancient alcoholic beverage made from fermented pears traditionally popular in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and parts of south Wales as well as in Normandy and Anjou, France.

Despite its juvenile fawn mascot and name, Babycham made us feel like grown-ups even as the real grown-ups in our world were acting like children.

With Role Models Like These…

September 13, 2013

A thirteen year old’s reading list. At the time (the early 1970s) I didn’t see anything unusual in my choice of reading. With my mother out partying every night with a wild cast of American expats and European jetsetters, the insane drug addicted narcissists of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of Dolls, the rapacious unhappy housewife of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and the incestuous courtesans of Jean Plaidy’s Light on Lucrezia didn’t strike me as abnormal or different from the real world. In fact, they confirmed to me that life with my mother may not have been all that unusual in the great scheme of things.

It may be an odd worldview for a thirteen year old but it was all I had.

Goodreads Giveaway Winners!

September 12, 2013

Signed copies of CHANEL BONFIRE are off to our two lucky Goodreads Giveaway winners in Aurora, Colorado, and St. Louis, Missouri! Isn’t it fun to win stuff?!

And whether you live in Missouri or Colorado, Texas or Bermuda, London or Paris, Berlin or Singapore, Indonesia or Indiana, Tokyo or Toledo, you and your Book Group can schedule a Skype or FaceTime Q & A with me. They’re really fun and a great way to get all your questions about Chanel answered and to share your own experiences with “difficult” mothers and and surviving childhood. Just email me at chanelbonfire@gmail.com.

Wendy Lawless at the West Hollywood Book Fair

September 10, 2013

The program schedule is out for the 2013 West Hollywood Book Fair on Sunday, September 29th in West Hollywood Park.

I’ll be appearing on a terrific panel called “MEMOIR: FAMILY TIES” at the Behind the Screens Stage at 1:30PM.

The panel will be moderated by Rachel Resnick great writer and author of, among others, LOVE JUNKIE. CHANEL BONFIRE and I will be sharing the stage with Scott C. Johnson (THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN), Linda Daly (THE LAST PILGRIMAGE) and James Brown (THE LOS ANGELES DIARIES).

I hope to see you there!

In the Library!

September 9, 2013

“Nine Lives” by Varjak, Paul

“With the Rich and Mighty” by Connor, Macaulay

While there are almost no card catalogues left in libraries, there is still the virtual thrill of looking up one’s book in the computer or on-line catalogue. “Chanel Bonfire” by Lawless, Wendy. It is an unbeatable thrill — different from finding the book in a store or having it become a bestseller.

I think this may be because, for most of us, going to the library for the first time is a major event. A library card is probably the first piece of ID a person can have. It’s also a matter of pride for a child; it declares to the world that the bearer of this card is “a reader”, a person who can read. It also comes with responsibility. When you take out a book, your name, your card number, is put down as the person responsible for that book for the next two weeks. In the old days, your name would be hand written on the book’s card and the date hand stamped.

My first library card was issued by the New York Public Library. Since then I’ve had many cards from different libraries. And I’m so pleased to find my book in The Glendale Public Library where I live, The Pasadena Public Library where I wrote some of the book, The Los Angeles and West Hollywood Public Libraries where we first took our children, the small red brick Carnegie public library in Hancock, New Hampshire, where our family live and, of course The New York Public Library where my sister still lives and where I plan to visit the book next time I’m in town. Provided it’s not out!

Fashion Week

September 6, 2013

Fashion meant a lot to my mother. She saw it as a visa that enabled her to travel from provincial Kansas City and Minneapolis to glamourous New York, London and Paris. Couture and tailored clothes from designers and stores like Bergdorf Goodman became essential to the creation of her new selves: Mrs. Oliver Rea a chic trophy wife and then the ex-Mrs. Oliver Rea, swinging divorcee and jet setter.

My stepfather facilitated this with open accounts anywhere she cared to dress. I still have a couple of the most beautiful black Italian silk cocktail dresses with lead weighted hems made for her at Bergdorf’s.

Fashion week or as it used to be called Press Week became something she paid attention to and looked forward to like the changing of the leaves in Central Park outside her windows in the Dakota. Long after the apartment was gone however, the clothes still hung in her closets, reminders of Fall and Spring collections past.

Goodreads Fall Giveaway!

September 4, 2013

If you have a friend who hasn’t read Chanel or if you are still waiting for your name to come up on the waiting list at the library, enter the Fall Chanel Bonfire Goodreads Giveaway for a chance to win one of two free autographed hardback copies!

And remember, if your Book Group is planning to read Chanel Bonfire, I’d be happy to schedule a Skype or FaceTime Q & A with you anytime, anywhere in the world! Contact me at chanelbonfire@gmail.com

Happy Fall!

Wendy

Making Scents of Life

September 3, 2013

“Mother leaned towards us, opened her arms, and drew us to her. She smelled like her new perfume, which was very sweet and expensive. It even had a name that went with her new life: Joy.” — Chanel Bonfire

As much or more than clothes, jewelry, accessories, hair and make-up, perfume can announce, define and refine a person’s image. If “style” is the way in which a person wears a stock item, then perfume is the trickiest of things to “style” because the way in which a person wears it is determined by their own chemistry, their own essence.

Just as my mother’s life could be measured by husbands and lovers, hair styles, or fashion designers, it could be marked by scent. Joy was the scent of the honeymoon period of her second marriage — the scent she wore at her wedding in the Dakota, a scent of promise and hope and happiness that she thought, at the time, was hers.

Interestingly it had been created almost forty years earlier at another moment of promise and hope that was not to be, 1929, the year of the great stock market crash. Henri Almeras created it for Jean Patou by distilliing, among other things, 10,000 Jasmine flowers and 28 dozen roses for a mere 30 ml.

Making perfume is a bit of a paradox — a guessing game that requires precise chemistry but also, ultimately, a kind of alchemy in which the common and rare essences of flowers and plants and animals can be brought to a point where, with the addition of skin and sweat of a thousand strangers, it is transformed into desire. The brutal extraction of purity becomes ethereal. (See Patrick Suskind’s wonderful novel Perfume for an entertaining primer.)

As Mother’s joy in her second marriage faded, Joy was tossed aside and replace, appropriately enough by…

…Fracas. Created in 1948 by Germaine Cellier for Robert Piquet who was a designer for Paul Poiret.

Adieu, l’été! Auf Wiedersehen, Sommer! ?????????? ????????, ????! Goodbye, Summer! ??????Selamat tinggal, musim panas!

August 30, 2013

Labor Day weekend is the traditional end of Summer in the United States. This has been a particularly hot one in Southern California where I live. And I’ve spent most of it hunkered down at my desk or in an air-conditioned library working on the sequel to Chanel Bonfire. But I’ve also–via Skype and Facetime, Twitter and Facebook and this blog–been able to meet and talk to many wonderful people who’ve read Chanel and want to discuss it, ask questions or share their own stories of childhood, mothers and sisters. I’ve made friends with readers in England, France, Germany, Australia, Russia, Latvia, Japan, China, Indonesia, Brazil and many other places as well. Thank you all for reading the book and sharing your friendship. Here’s to a wonderful autumn… or spring if you’re in the southern hemisphere!

The Chanel Bonfire paperback will be out in November! Just in time for the holidays.

And remember, if your book group is reading Chanel and would like to schedule a Q & A with me via Skype or FaceTime just email me at chanelbonfire@gmail.com!

The Summer Wind Winds Down: Georgann Rea and Frank Sinatra

August 29, 2013

The Summer Wind Winds Down

Frank Sinatra headlines (bien sur) the Chanel Bonfire Spotify Playlist. He was a steady voice, a soundtrack to my mother, Georgann Rea’s life — from a girl in Kansas City dreaming off his songs of getting away to another world to a lonely soul living out some of his saddest sentiments. Fittingly, it was Sinatra and his daughter who optioned Mother’s unpublished autobiography “Someone Turn Off The Wind Machine”. It was indevelopment at Fox for much of the 1980s with Frank to play the role of my crusty grandfather. Alas, it never came to be. I listened to a lot of his music while working on sections of Chanel. The beginning of the playlist reflects the music of my mother which dominated the earliest years of our lives and then the list shifts to the music of my sister and me which then takes over the last part of the book. We all have playlists for our lives. What’s on yours?