Word: eisenstadt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...EISENSTADT'S imagination has served her well for the novel's Rockaway scenes--which emerge as perceptive, believeable, and realistic. No one will find Eisenstadt's characters as jaded and junky as Ellis' typical waste cases, and she is quite defensive about that difference. "I don't think my characters have slept with 72 people. They're not cynical about what's happened to them or what hasn't happened to them. They're not full of loathing and spite," Eisenstadt says. "They're just looking for love...
...meet Jill Eisenstadt, however, is to be underwhelmed, and this is not an insult. She seems astonishingly normal and low-key, the kind of person who claims she previously couldn't even answer questions at interviews. Despite her Irish-looking face, she says, "I'm really Jewish, even though I don't look...
...makes the distinction to ward off any suggestions that From Rockaway is any more than somewhat autobiographical. Unlike the Catholic-school casualties she describes in her story, Eisenstadt went to public school and lived in a different neighborhood in Rockaway. She's never been to a "death keg" party, never jumped off a 40-foot bridge into the Atlantic's mucky low tide, and has never taken part in any other beach-bum antics. "A lot of the stories in the book are true--or at least I've heard them as true," she says. "But it's based...
Well, maybe some of them are, but it's hard to call Eisenstadt's subjects soft and sensitive, although they are often quite funny in their callousness...
What many readers who remember their own college days will find troubling in From Rockaway are the Camden College scenes--full of bleary-eyed dialogue, Dress To Get Laid parties, and a lot of action without much thought. Once again, Eisenstadt claims this was nothing like her own experience at Bennington, which she says she "liked a lot, but I'm sure everyone is picturing fictional Camden." She adds that "Bennington is really a very good school. I really worked very hard. I didn't have much of a social life there, which is funny considering how the book comes...