I HAVE NEVER done four posts on the same day before--trying to catch up, obviously.
Anyway, here is the real prize of the day, a brilliant long tale by DeWitt, published as a stand-alone volume of 69 pages in the New Directions Storybook series.
The narrator was orphaned by the death of her staggeringly wealthy parents when still a toddler, then raised by an opportunistic couple who posed as her parents and then, when the narrator turned seventeen, abandoned her, making off with all of the staggering wealth.
Left with little in the way of financial resources, the narrator does however land a big book deal, her publishers being confident a tale of great trauma and great wealth will be a sure-fire bestseller.
The tale is, to begin with, the opening pages of the narrator's memoir, which is soon interrupted by frantic and imperfectly literate correspondence from her editor, who anxiously notes that there not yet much in the story about trauma and emotions and such. Judging from what the narrator tells us, the opportunistic couple, in their own way, prepared the narrator for adulthood unusually well, and she is cognizant, even grateful, for how they raised her.
The editor gets angry about the missing trauma and emotions and threatens to terminate the contract, at which point she and we learn just how very, very well prepared for adulthood the narrator is.
A quick and delightful read. I hear it's selling well, too, and deservedly so.
No comments:
Post a Comment