Word: fraziers
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...latest book, Venus Envy, is a rather light-hearted tale about a beautiful, rich, successful woman named Mary Frazier Armstrong who is dying of cancer. She writes affecting farewell letters to her friends and family in her last moments, confessing her dreadful secret: she is gay. And then wakes up the morning after to the knowledge that she only has bronchitis, and will live for many more years...
Brown denies that Venus Envy is autobiographical. "People always think that...But Frazier and I are so different. The character--everything has to come out of the character." At her reading, she described herself as a "thief of souls," crawling into the skins of lots of very different people. Nevertheless, Frazier has enormous similarities to the woman...
...Frazier is fiercely individualistic, without political or religious affiliations. Brown demonstrates the same resistance to taking sides on certain issues. During her reading at the Brattle, she declared that "the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the difference between gonorrhea and syphilis." Later, when someone asked for her opinion on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill affair, she blamed them both for being naive enough to play into the hands of the media: "It was so duplicitous, the way they pitted a Black man against a Black woman and sat back and licked their chops...
...Frazier refuses to define herself as a lesbian. This is one of the most refreshing things about Rita Mae Brown: she does not construct a rigid gay identity for her characters. The dividing line between gay and straight remains very fluid. For example, the goddess Venus--who materializes near the novel's end--believes that the division of people into the two categories is "a silly concept, but then you know people think in polarities these days. That's very destructive." Similarly, during her reading, Brown remarked: "I am never immune to the charms of the opposite sex...I just...
...think all groups go through a period where there is a lull in activism or a lull in people participating," Frazier says. "We've done a lot of political stuff this year. It's an issue of visibility...