Famous Baby - Softcover

Rizzo, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1938849302 ISBN 13: 9781938849305

Verlag: PROSPECT PARK BOOKS, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Los Angeles Times Summer Books Preview selection
Los Angeles Magazine Now Read This: The Best of L.A.
A Jane's Addiction Pick, W Magazine
South Florida Lifestyle Summer Read
Zoe Report Best Summer Beach Read
HelloGiggles Summer Guide to Truly Spectacular Reading

“Famous Baby is inventive, hysterical, and touching. Karen Rizzo wraps a timeless drama about the love between mothers and daughters in a fresh, snappy package for the social media age.” —CHRISTINA SCHWARZ, author of The Edge of the Earth and Drowning Ruth, an Oprah’s Book Club Selection

Before there were Real Housewives and Tiger Moms, the was Ruth Sternberg, the hugely popular First Mother of Mommy Blogging—or, as Ruth’s daughter, Abbie prefers to call her, the First Lady of Cyber Exploitation.

Eighteen year-old Abbie has finally found her way out of the limelight, by moving a solid five hundred miles away from Ruth and her “maternal instincts.” But when she hears that her ailing, beloved grandmother is moving in with Ruth, she suspects that her mother has found a new blog subject to exploit. Abbie kidnaps Grandma to save her from the same fate, and thus begins an uproarious battle of wills. Famous Baby wisely and hilariously explores mother love, identity, and the hazards of parental over-sharing in the social media age.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Karen Rizzo, who lives with her actor husband and two children in Los Angeles, California, is the author of the Book Sense/IndieBound selection Things to Bring, S#!T to Do, a memoir built around her penchant for lists. The recipient of a MAGGIE Award for Best Essay in a West Coast Consumer Magazine, her stories and essays have appeared on NPR and in the Los Angeles Times, Living Fit, Salon, Beatrice, Fresh Yarn, and VIVmag as well as the anthology Life’s A Stitch: The Best of Contemporary Women’s Humor. Her plays and performance pieces have been seen at ARCADE (Los Angeles), Playwrights Horizons Theatre School and Samuel Beckett Theatre (New York), and Ensemble Studio Theatre (New York and Los Angeles), where she is a longtime member. Famous Baby is her first novel.

Karen Rizzo, who lives with her actor husband and two children in Los Angeles, California, is the author of the Book Sense/IndieBound selection Things to Bring, S#!T to Do, a memoir built around her penchant for lists. The recipient of a MAGGIE Award for Best Essay in a West Coast Consumer Magazine, her stories and essays have appeared on NPR and in the Los Angeles Times, Living Fit, Salon, Beatrice, Fresh Yarn, and VIVmag as well as the anthology Life's A Stitch: The Best of Contemporary Women's Humor. Her plays and performance pieces have been seen at ARCADE (Los Angeles), Playwrights Horizons Theatre School and Samuel Beckett Theatre (New York), and Ensemble Studio Theatre (New York and Los Angeles), where she is a longtime member. Famous Baby is her first novel.

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Famous Baby

A Novel

By Karen Rizzo

Prospect Park Books

Copyright © 2014 Karen Rizzo
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-938849-30-5

CHAPTER 1

RUTH

I blame Mary Lou fucking Retton. I blame her for raising the bar for teenage girls, for singlehandedly altering the consciousness of an entire generation of women and effectively ending any chance I had of becoming someone my own daughter would like.

Like me, you couldn't have been sixteen the summer of 1984 and, having witnessed that imperturbably ecstatic, muscle-bound spark plug beat out her competition with inhuman ease, been happy selling "Greet the Tall Ships" T-shirts on a hot Long Island beach boardwalk. Watching Mary Lou on TV those nights confirmed the existence of God, life on Mars, and the possibility for happiness. Mary Lou. Me. Mary Lou and me. She was the darling of the 1984 Olympics, the winningest American female gymnast in the history of those games. And I ... I was the Jones Beach concession-stand cashier with the most pathetic sales that summer. Piled beside me was my tower of small to extra-large white T-shirts announcing the coming of the Tall Ships, sailing from every port in the world to New York's East River in celebration of America's independence. At the far west end of the beach I sat, the keeper of those silk-screened beauties. Come, celebrate, greet the Tall Ships! Those tall fucking ships. I wore one of those shirts every single day and scribbled down my personal sixteen-year-old suburban-girl angst in the diary that I carried everywhere that summer—a tiny felt journal with a faux-fur tiger on the cover. I had no choice but to scribble—if I'd had a choice, I would have been Mary Lou Retton. Or Missy Cataldo—my best friend Missy, with the Playboy Bunny breasts, steel-reinforced thighs, and impossibly thick mane of hair pulled back in a ponytail that was bleached green from daily swim-team practice.

Among the junior lifeguards at Jones Beach that summer, Missy held the distinction of spotting the most drowners—those beachgoers who insisted upon dogpaddling too far out into the cold ocean, only to cramp up and sink. Behind her killer stack and Chlorine Barbie looks, Missy was a brain, and the only other kid in Mr. Harris's tenth-grade English class, aside from me, who knew that "four legs good, two legs bad" referred to a need for unity in the face of oppression and not a wrecked gateleg table. She had a dumb-smart Judy Holliday kind of laugh that she perfected by watching Born Yesterday over and over, and I was the girl who actually knew who Judy Holliday was.

Connie was the third member of our group, although we weren't really a group, just three beach-weary compatriots and veterans of the same disbanded Camp Fire Girls troop. Connie was working her third summer at the concession stand down the boardwalk from me. She was already looking forward to attending some Ivy League college that was known to have the worst winters and most freshmen suicides of any school on the northeastern seaboard. That summer, Connie already couldn't wait for it to be next summer, when she'd be seventeen and able to quit her "stupid beach existence," as she called it, and intern in an air-conditioned office somewhere in midtown Manhattan, where she imagined wearing support pantyhose and taking cigarette breaks at the water cooler. She was anxious to start down the road she was convinced would lead to her becoming the first female governor of New York. But that summer, she was stuck working the East End concession stand. She sat on a stool inside one of the cool, cavernous beach buildings, beside one of a half-dozen ancient manual cash registers with the drawer wide open, ringing up purchases while following the principle of "one for them, one for me." Connie kept track of all those one for mes inside her own electronic cash-register brain. She'd smile winningly at the concession managers, the mothers in skirted swimsuits, and the kids with third-degree sunburns, and then ring up one for them and one for me, another one for them and another one for me.

"You're crazy—how do you do it?" I asked her in the echoing din of sandy, shuffling feet and screaming children.

"It's easy," she shouted back. Reaching into the freezer, she grabbed two ice cream push-ups and tossed them in front of me. Then she rang up one for forty-five cents and, smiling brightly at me instead of ringing up the second one, said, "Ninety cents, please." Since the forty-five cent total was hidden on the broken display, and Connie's smile was so bright and genuine, the customer usually handed her the ninety cents without a second thought. All the managers trusted her, because she was the smartest cashier they'd had in many summers, and the line at her register was always moving. Her supervisor wanted to promote her to manager, but Connie demurred. "Oh, no," she said, "I'd much rather work on the floor, interacting with all the fascinating people." Her career in politics was already well under way. At the end of the day, Connie would treat us all to chocolate egg creams and BLTs at the Palms Deli, courtesy of her daily graft.

"Such a generous friend," my mother often said. "You're lucky to have her, and that Missy—such a lovely girl."

But Connie and Missy struck me as the lucky ones: They were perfectly happy being themselves. I was the one who wanted to be Mary Lou Retton.

And why wasn't I? Why, at the very least, didn't my parents push me to study violin or piano or the French horn at the tender age of three so I could at least become a world-class virtuoso? Why was I stuck on Long Island, peddling a bunch of stupid T-shirts while pimply, sunburned lifeguards made lewd jokes from behind their stupid mirrored aviators? But most importantly, why wasn't I Mary Lou? So I scribbled some more, and the more I scribbled, the longer my diary became. I scribbled about everything puzzling and disappointing in my life, eventually making it into a story about someone else living in an alternate-universe version of my New York suburb. It was the fictional version of my life—because God forbid I should reveal anyone else's bloody secrets—and I called it Mary Lou and Me. It was my first novel, and it was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for longer than anyone ever could have imagined.

Mary Lou and Me was about a girl named Anais, who'd been jettisoned into the dangerous, uncharted territory of high school. In the course of three hundred pages, our heroine survived not only her senior year but also the deaths of her father and her best friend, a near-fatal car accident, and a couple of dozen "humiliating, agonizing—yet, at the same time, oddly hysterical—situations," all leading her to the ultimate realization that it's true, you can't go home again; and maybe you don't want to in the first place. It's always seemed to me that the past is kind of pointless, anyway. There's nothing you can do about it; there's nothing you can do with it, except carry it around and try to survive it. Given the choice, I've always been one of those people who think it's best to let sleeping dogs lie.

I was twenty when Mary Lou and Me was published—my first and only novel. I had turned my life into a funny and tragic fiction and actually became my own Mary Lou. But a new problem soon presented itself—namely, topping that literary gold-medal equivalent—and I struggled over my second novel for the next seven years, with no success. Along the way, I fell in love with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PROSPECT PARK BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1938849302
• ISBN 13: 9781938849305
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 261
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland