Good Morning.
I ordered the book. At my age I should know better, but I did it anyway and apparently I'm not alone. Amazon usually gets a book out almost overnight but tells me it may be mid-February before I receive this one, just in time for Valentine's Day reading with a nice cup of coffee or a glass of wine. Oh my.
I remember my first questionable book, a novel by Grace Metalious entitled Peyton Place. I was twelve when it came out and I got it from someone else my age who had probably swiped it from her mother's purse. I never would have purchased it at a bookstore, not that I had any money, but I was determined to read it, along with several other friends of similar moral degeneracy. The novel, set in a fictional town in New Hampshire populated with self-righteous, gossipy folks, introduced me to behavior I had never heard about before. Certain pages were earmarked as being particularly instructive and added to the information I had received a couple of years before from a tent mate at summer camp who was happy to tell me all about what my mother had avoided discussing. When I got home, I confronted her and nearly threw up when she confirmed what Gail Danaher had shared with me by flashlight. You never forget the name of someone who sends you into a state of shock.
My second deviation from classic literature was a novel by Mary McCarthy about eight women who graduate from Vassar. The Group, like Peyton Place, was on The New York Times best seller list for months but was banned in Australia, Italy, and Ireland, a fact that enticed even more people to buy it, of course. It delved into all kinds of sexual misconduct including harassment in the workplace decades before anyone talked about it. If memory serves, page 30 was the real eye-opener
in that one.
Then there was the worst of the worst, The Washington Fringe Benefit by Elizabeth Ray who had, in real life, caused a scandal in 1976 that ended the career of a congressman from Ohio. Apparently delighted to capitalize, no pun intended, on her experiences, Ms. Ray penned a truly sordid novelette about female staffers who fool around with virtually anyone in power. It is well known that I am not happy in any form of aircraft so I try to distract myself when I'm buckled into a seat 35,000 feet above the earth and bought the book at the Minneapolis airport before flying to Connecticut to visit my parents. I was a grown woman by then and the mother of three children I hauled to church every week, but no matter, I finished off that piece of garbage by the time I landed at Bradley Field. The kicker here is that my stepmother, a well-bred, sensible woman, spied the book at some point and also wanted to read it. I declined her, of course, but she pestered me throughout the visit and just before I left to return to the plains of South Dakota, I tucked it in the top drawer of her dresser. By the time I got home and telephoned to say that I was safe and sound, she had already discovered the book and read it from cover to cover. I found that rather comforting at the time.
Would she read Michael Wolff's expose about the current White House? My feeling is that she would never pay good money for it as I have or show her face at Barnes and Noble which I have not but would tell me to send it to her the minute I was done with it. The difference between Fire and Fury and the others is, of course, that it's about real people, despite the president's insistence to the contrary. The thing they have in common is that they were written to make gobs of money.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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