Word: cora
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Fisher's alter ego is the screenwriter Cora. In letters to her unborn baby scattered throughout the story, we find out she's naming the baby Esme, even though it sounds like a noise her nose makes, and we learn that the she can't resist cracking a joke about serious things. Cora also leads what she calls a "noisy life" full of parties and problems and oodles of self-absorption. This cycle dominates, except of course, when she is forced to make room for the plot...
Held loosely together by the letters to Esme, the story unfolds clumsily in the three disparate parts. First, Cora falls in love with the attentive Southerner Ray but is just too darn neurotic to make it work. They try to save their relationship by nursing her dying friend William through the last stages of AIDS. When William dies, the relationship falls apart, but it's OK because Cora doesn't miss Ray much; she has rationalized it all away...
...times Cora's cracks painfully reflect her tension. She writes to Esme, "I am resigned to the fact that you will like your father better than you like me. Hell, for a long time I liked him better than me and that was after living with him better part of a year, which doesn't exactly endear people to you as a rule (ask around)." Poor Cora, she alienates Ray with her cynical humor and is left to the less interesting two-thirds of Delusions...
...Cora is funnier when she is keeping her distance from Ray. It is really too bad though, that she never works things out, because we feel always as if resolution is possible and that Ray could be good from her (in spite of the goo) if only she would grow...
...slow death of William from AIDS is supposed to be transformative for Ray and Cora. William shows up as the relationship disintegrates and both relationship and William proceed to die. Rather than stirring immediate sympathy, the introduction of William is awkward because he has hardly been mentioned before and is promptly given center stage. Fisher can't really handle such a big topic, and William serves mainly to delay the finality of Ray and Cora's split...