Word: cora
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...train, with Cora searching for meaning, things start to fall apart. We know, because we're at the end of the book, that the feeling of incompleteness about Ray is all we're going to get. We are still confused by the whole episode with William--surely his death was more than just a stall tactic? Even her jokes are starting to falter ("Berth and birth--she attempted to wrangle the words into a suitable pun, but nothing come.") And now Fisher has given us another invalid to contend with, the unsympathetic, addled Grandpa...
Grandpa's plight, however, is secondary to the fact that Cora is on this journey for herself. With the aid of her eccentric, truth-dispensing mother ("A clean colon does wonders for the will to live"), Cora come to the conclusion that "things did not always go as you planned, much less make a handy brand of the right kind of sense." We can only hope that this tidbit of knowledge will make her a better mother than she was grown...
There is an awkward tension in Delusions which stems from the fact that we are readers can probably see more about Cora than Fisher can because she wrote herself into the book. We watch Cora make her mistakes, be confronted by them, and make a winning remark, but she never really takes action with her new knowledge...
...Carrie Fisher hasn't grown up herself, she doesn't have the freedom to write about it in Cora, so there is always the feeling of elements at work that neither the author nor the character are aware of. We end up wishing for a very good shrink for the both them. This is the trouble with Fisher's brand of fictionalized truth...
...readers who are delighted when Cora signs her letters to Em "Mom Sequitur" or who laugh at the joke "What are the saddest two words in the English language? What party?", Delusions of Grandma is an entertaining read. But at $22.00 and a two-hour reading time, even the staunchest Fisher fan would be wise to wait for the paperback...