Word: surrealness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wasn't something my parents forced me to do," she says. "It was something I knew I loved, I knew I wanted to devote time to. Winning that gold medal with that team was just spectacular--the emotional high we were on, it was just surreal...
Somehow in the midst of uneasiness and sadness, the novel sparkles with the humor of the surreal (in one exchange, Lily asks Ronny "What did you do to yourself?" and is met with "Oh. I caught fire.") and with unusual imagery (Lily is called "every inch a Sea Monkey... Pale and alien and underwater"). But while the bleak humor is generated by the peculiarities of the characters, there is a definite authorial love for the seemingly unlovable characters, a love which transfers to the reader...
...participants form a motley but impressive menagerie. A yellow, diamond-headed retro pick-up leaves a black Corvette limping along behind it to the finish line. Lake a scene from a surreal self-help movie, "Impatience" is neck and neck with the blue and red "Mid-Life Crisis." The motorcycles--mostly garishly-colored Japanese makes interspersed with the occasional squat, old Harley--are faster than most of the cars, occasionally breaking the 10-second barrier, and their starts are more impressive, the drivers in tight leather racing suits rising up and leaning far out over the handlebars like sprinters before...
...found Mark in Joyce's unheated basement. He hadn't expected me. This is so surreal, he said. I'm glad you exist, I replied. In a Cartesian sense at any rate, he responded. It was a little depressing, but I was proud to have done it, to have found my long lost uncle Mark. My manhunt was complete; I had finally won a scavenger hunt. (I always lost the ones with the eggs.) And there he was, not even huddled under a bridge. We chatted, but I was tired and Mark's never been good with conversation. Well...
...Instead, after a period of adolescent turmoil--anorexia, an impulsive and brief marriage to a biker at age 19--Hughes became a painter and an author of children's books. Eventually, she settled in Wooroloo, "a small hamlet, very small," in Australia, to paint landscapes of the stark, almost surreal terrain. And, as it happened, to write poetry that other people might read...