Word: girlhood
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Another tenement symphony full of Cohens and Kellys, bubbling chicken soup and the sound of young Rachmani-noffs practicing scales? Simon is not ashamed of a well-timed note of nostalgia, but her memoir of girlhood in the South Bronx during the 1920s will be remembered for its discordances. Being part of the Old World and female is something the author cannot forget or forgive. Beneath its iridescent surface, her book is a hard, unsentimental look at a sort of "World of Our Mothers," a place of unwanted pregnancies, illegal abortions, abandonments and the desolate sense that a husband often...
...Group that brought the prodigal daughter back from Paris to her alma mater, but an invitation to celebrate her 70th birthday by being Vassar's first "Distinguished Visitor." Mary McCarthy, class of '33, the ironical Athena of American letters (The Stones of Florence, Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, Cannibals and Missionaries) returned to the scene of her biting 1963 bestseller about the travails of eight alumnae. She has always thought Vassar had good teachers, it was the students she objected to. In the 1950s she described them as a "pretty, polite, docile and serene mass." When males arrived...
...father's assorted volumes from the Book-of-the-Month Club fed her curiosity. By the age often, she could drive both a truck and a tractor. "I didn't do all the things boys did, but I fixed windmills and repaired fences." Recalls her girlhood friend and cousin, Flournoy Manzo: "We played with dolls, but we knew what to do with screwdrivers and nails too. Living on a ranch made us very self-sufficient...
Gordon seems to see friendships as the most interesting and fruitful relations. In Payments. Isabel's relationships with two girlhood friends is critical, and female friendships are the central focus of Women. Father Cyprian's retreat participants are quite different sorts and brought together initially only through their association with him. Yet, a successful businesswoman shares her experience with and draws comfort from a simple housewife...
...first like a sweet '20s flapper and turns savage with frightening speed, manipulating her husband with thinly disguised sexuality. But the unmitigated passion which drives her can go just as easily the other way, into fear and insanity, and she crumbles beautifully, back into the flapper and beyond into girlhood. Searing her hand on a candle flame, she tragically reminds us of an inner power that once tried to unsex her but never succeeded...