M's Return to Fiction (cue trumpets)

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I had bookstore anxiety. It was getting to the point where each time I'd set foot in a Borders or a Barnes and Noble, I'd become overwhelmed by dozens of titles and authors I so desperately wanted to read. Within 30 minutes or so, I'd be hot and perspiring, with a touch of upset stomach. Of course, that's the same physical response I have whenever I want to buy something but feel I shouldn't (clothes, mostly), but lately it's occurring primarily in bookstores, and with great intensity.

The thing is, I was suffering from Fiction Withdrawal. I hadn't picked up a novel since...well, I can't remember! That's not like me. Could it have been that the last novel I'd read was The Color Purple, back in the spring? No, I'm sure not. I must be forgetting something. But the point is, it's been quite awhile. Too long!

I trace my unplanned respite from fiction back to the pleasant June day S surprised me with a copy of My Life, Bill Clinton's autobiography. It was a thrilling, thoughtful gift that S had somehow acquired from his work for free. Woo! So I dove into that with gusto for several weeks, but then petered out about a third of the way through in late August or so (around Clinton's birthday, in fact). Feeling a bit bogged down by the density of the chapters on Clinton's early political life in the nineteen-sixties, I decided to take a temporary hiatus and return to the book at a later date. I should add here that I actually really wrestled with this decision, as I tend always to see a book through to the end on principle. I'm just not one to abandon a story partway through. However, to read Clinton's autobiography from beginning to end without a break might have caused my head to explode, and I couldn't risk that! I must take care to preserve whatever precious brain matter I have left now that I'm on the cusp of my thirties.

Anywho. Clinton got tucked inside my nightstand drawer, and I read a few light things here and there, one of which was...a-hem...former supermodel Janice Dickinson's memoir, No Lifeguard on Duty, which was surprisingly well-written (hello, ghostwriter). Finishing that one (in two days; the thing was such an easy read) stoked my nearly lifelong fascination with the world of modeling and fashion, and I was prompted to buy Michael Gross's Model, The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, which I've been plodding through ever since. The thing is thick, a bit dry (despite the critics' tantalizing snippets on the front and back cover that describe it as a "juicy tell-all," blah blah blah), and poorly written (or edited, or both). It's definitely a comprehensive history of the modeling industry in the United States and France, but I kept getting distracted by Gross's strange turns of phrase and not-quite-right figurative language. He's certainly a thorough researcher, but his writing is nothing to admire, and it can even be bothersome at times.

So. Having made my way from modeling's beginnings to its Studio 54 heyday in the nineteen-seventies, I tired of the book and put it down, again undergoing considerable guilt because of my decision. (Fortunately, though, the book reads less like a continuous story and more like a reference guide, so picking it up again won't require much mental exercise in terms of remembering "where the story left off," so to speak. Unlike My Life. Eek!)

After putting the Gross book down and seeing Funny Face, the Hepburn-Astaire film about an ordinary-woman-turned-international-modeling-superstar cited frequently by Gross in his big old book (it's not such a hot movie; I'll save that for another entry), I officially declared an end to my little modeling jag and wondered what to read next. For some reason, indulging in a novel felt like cheating, since I felt I somehow didn't deserve it after putting two nonfiction works down unfinished. I spent a few weeks with my face buried in magazines and Internet journalism pieces (Slate and Salon, especially around the time of the election), but finally two holiday-shopping excursions to big, wonderful bookstores did me in. There was nothing to do but read some fiction! Even J here at work suggested it might be just the thing.

So this past weekend I finally picked up Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, a novel I'd bought this past summer but hadn't yet cracked open. I'd been feeling nostalgic for Southern fiction on and off this year, and managed to squeak The Color Purple in, but nothing else. Having read The Golden Apples by Welty in that Southern Fiction class in college (fabulous course; brilliant, mercurial, rather inflexible professor who loathed me), and having remembered said professor speaking highly of The Optimist's Daughter, I decided I couldn't go wrong choosing that one. Indeed, I'm not quite halfway through the slim little paperback and already I find myself thinking about the characters on and off throughout the day. It also seems like a timely choice, considering the situation with my grandmother. The main character in the novel, Laurel (the optimist's daughter, natch), has just seen her father, the optimist, die by what comes across as his own will after undergoing risky but not normally life-threatening eye surgery to repair a slipped retina. Now she has returned to her childhood home in Mississippi (from Chicago) to attend his funeral and take care of his affairs. Complicating matters is his father's much-younger wife of a mere one-and-a-half years, Fay, whose behavior suggests she is selfish and childish and holds her deceased husband's family in contempt.

Welty strikes a perfect balance of melancholy and honesty in her storytelling, and her writing seems effortlessly elegant and uncomplicated. She does a marvelous job of attending to detail (but without making things messy, like some writers), like the way she includes the sights and sounds of the loud, rowdy Mardi Gras carnival going on in New Orleans very close to the hospital where Laurel and Fay sit with Laurel's father during the weeks immediately proceeding his eye surgery. Fay longs to join the revelers outside, while Laurel finds them noisy and upsetting.

Anyway, I am thoroughly savoring my Return to Fiction with this book. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, it feels nourishing, in a way. If I'm still hungering for Southern writing when I finish, I've got Clyde Edgarton's Killer Diller in my bookshelf still unread. Otherwise, I might make a go of Jane Austen's Persuasion (another summertime purchase that's gone neglected) or The Lovely Bones, which S read earlier this year and has been recommending to me ever since.