While many people’s kids have gone back to school and they are already mourning the end of summer, there are some who save vacation for the bitter end–those last, often unbearable hot and muggy days of August before the weather turns. If you still have a summer trip to look forward to, consider passing the hours on the freeway or in the airplane with an audio book. I think being read to is one of the greatest luxuries. It’s a lesson or an entertainment when you’re a child, a necessity when you are very very young or very old, but for me, at any time (not just when I face hours of pavement and tail lights) it is a delight.
One of the greatest audio books of all time in my opinion is E.B. White’s reading of his own Charlotte’s Web. We had already read the book to our children a number of times when a friend turned us on to White’s recording. And it is wonderful — full of his intent, sly wit and rolled out in his clipped New York State accent. I read a bit about his choices when recording and the difficulty he had not crying at the end and I thought of it when recording the audio book of Chanel Bonfire for Tantor. If you’re looking for a book to listen to, it is available for download and on CD, at bookstores, booksites and the library.
One of our last summers in Minneapolis with our father. A friend of the family took this amazing series of the three of us in the park. Thanks to the publication of Chanel, they resurfaced as if from a time capsule or the messages Robbie and I stuffed into coke bottles and dropped from the QE2 as our mother sailed us away.
For some time between Mother’s original, orphaned self, Loretta Gronau, and her ultimate self-made self, Georgann Rea, there was the girl above — Georgann Mary Margaret McAdams, St. Teresa’s Academy Class of 1956. She was a pretty, young, intelligent girl rescued from an orphanage and living the life of a princess in the wealthy Plaza section of Kansas City, Missouri. And her life was a fairy tale in the truest sense because her step-mother was evil and the abuse and beatings she suffered inside her very large house went unknown by the outside world.
This Georgann was biding her time, dreaming of the next twist in her story, the arrival of the handsome prince and her rescue. And it happened when she met my father. And while she may have grabbed the keys to his white charger and jumped into the driver’s seat, the end result was the same–they went away to their fairy tale life. Only it wasn’t what the now Georgann Lawless had expected…
I came across the Fallen Princess series of photographs by Dina Goldstein a photographer based in Vancouver, BC, on Facebook. They are being “shared” and “liked” all over the place. They are, like my mother’s story and my own and most other women in one way or another I suspect, a fascinating expression of the ideas of what it is to be a woman in the last fifty or so years — a sometimes twisted combination of expectation, reality and fantasy fueled by our culture and history. Here’s a link to Dina’s site if you’d like to see more: http://www.fallenprincesses.com/
I suspect as the photos spread even wider, that they will come up in my Book Group Skype sessions. Inevitably, during our discussions of Chanel, readers share some of their own stories or their mothers and their childhoods. And while exact details are always different, there are basic struggles and issues of identity and freedom and frustration that seem common to us all from Betty Friedan who so clearly expressed my own step-mother’s frustrations with marriage and the role of wife that she got a divorce upon finishing her book to now in the responses I hear to Chanel Bonfire. Andrea Dworkin’s book “Women Hating” from the 70s has a very interesting chapter on fairy tales and the lives of women in contemporary society.
If your Book Group is reading Chanel, I’d be happy to set up a Skype or FaceTime Q & A with you. Just email me at chanelbonfire@gmail.com. I’m sure we all have lots to talk about!
“At graduation, after the diplomas were handed out, my class sang the Beatles song ‘In My Life.’ I’m sure that to the faculty or other students it seemed an appropriate choice of a song for a group of people whose lives were about to change forever, and who had happy times to look back on, but to me, it sounded like a dirge.
Mother, decked out in one of her Chanel suits, took my picture in my white cap and gown beside Robbie in the pretty, tree-lined courtyard in front of the school, where the Beaver graduations always took place.”
Thanks to The Next Chapter Book Club for a truly fun Saturday night! I can’t tell you how much fun we had and I can’t believe how lucky I am to get to meet so many interesting and thoughtful people. Chanel was our starting point but there was no end to what we could all discuss and share.
It couldn’t be easier to set up a Skype or FaceTime Q & A with me. Just email at chanelbonfire@gmail.com. Whether you’re around the corner or around the world, we can get together. Cheers!
Katherine ?@gentilek
Thanks to The Huffington Post for putting up my video.
http://videos.huffingtonpost.com/author-wendy-lawless-on-growing-up-with-her-mother-517476583
And to Howard Sherman for his HuffPo piece about memoir and Chanel, “All About My Friends, Indexed For Your Convenience”.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-sherman/all-about-my-friends-inde_b_2427045.html
