I must say I've had a really good run of nonfiction books so far this year. Although I love nonfiction and find so many subjects interesting and want to read about them (social history, history, art, science, biography, nature, travel . . . ), I am such a slow nonfiction reader I don't generally manage to finish as many in a year as I would like. In just the last three months, however, I've read four nonfiction books (okay, so one was a hold over from last year, but I'm counting it). That probably doesn't sound like much at all, but for someone who might read fewer than ten in an entire year, I feel like I'm off to a good start. And all the books I've read have been pretty exceptional, too.
Paula Fox is one of (I've had a few so far actually) my good finds this year. I loved Borrowed Finery and it makes me want to read everything else she has written. Maybe even the YA/Juvenile works, for which I think she is primarily known. I shared a few teasers last month, and may have to share a few more here.
Although Fox had a difficult childhood and upbringing, Borrowed Finery never felt like a 'misery memoir'. She tells her stories, rather they are more like vignettes of her growing up years, very matter-of-factly and in such an engaging manner that you can't help but find yourself completely absorbed, though perhaps there were a few cringe-worthy moments. Her sense of abandonment and confusion over why her mother was so cold and distant towards her makes your heart feel crushed, and I'm not sure she ever quite worked out why her mother reacted towards her the way she did.
"My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth. When I thought of the purposes I had tried to find for myself the last year, to show my father that I 'wanted' something-piano lessons, sculpture, none of the least use to me-when I thought of the madness of my parents where I was concerned, I felt the bleakest misery.'
Her mother was the daughter of Cuban immigrants and her father was an actor and screenwriter. The two met through one of her brothers who served in the Navy together with her father. Her parents had a somewhat volatile relationship and on more than one occasion Paula's mother made him choose between the two. Paula was usually bundled off with relatives and friends, so she spent her childhood and youth criss crossing the country. She spent time in New York, Cuba, Florida and Hollywood with other stops along the way--wherever and with whomever would look after her. Her parents were mostly absent, or would drop in or send for her for short periods of time, and ultimately they divorced.
"He and Elsie were getting a divorce."
"I had not thought of them as married. How could it be that Elsie was enough of an organic being to have carried me in her womb for a term? What I was sure of was that fate had determined that her presence was the price I had to pay in order to see my father. But when I did see him, his behavior with me--playful, sometimes cruel, a voice utterly inconsistent and capricious authority--confirmed my uneasiness, my ever-growing sense of being an impostor, outside life's laws."
Her childhood wasn't entirely unhappy, though. She shares fond memories of spending Saturday afternoons at the movies and cutting sepia-colored photographs out of magazines. She met people like James Cagney through her father and recalls the crushes she had on boys. She had a favorite uncle who lavished attention on her. After her parents divorced she did live with her father and his new girlfriend (eventually his wife), and when she was fifteen she went to a finishing school in Montréal. The borrowed finery of the title refers to the lack of permanency in her life growing up. She was rarely in one place long enough to have really close friends and was usually the recipient of unbecoming hand-me-downs, and what few gifts she was given by her father were more often than not retracted in the end.
There are some very humorous bits, however. When she was in finishing school she went by train to visit her father in New York.
"I spent my return fare on a dress I found in Altman's. Those were the days when you could return a garment even after a week or more as long as it wasn't torn or dirty. I planned to wear it to a Group Theatre production of an Irwin Shaw play, The Gentle People, and return the dress the following day. Franchot Tone was playing the lead. I noticed I attracted a good deal of attention as I walked down the theater aisle that night. Later, I found a large rectangular tag safety-pinned to the back of the dress."
Although the two had widely varying childhoods, Paula Fox puts me in mind of another favorite writer/memoirist, M.F.K. Fisher. Maybe it's due to their being contemporaries of a sort (though Fisher was born earlier) and growing up during and writing about the same eras, though I suspect it's more simply the quality of their writing. They are both eloquent and elegant writers, and certainly on the part of Fox, devastating, too. I'm reading The Coldest Winter now, a slender book that could probably be read in one sitting, but better to savour it I think.