Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress: Tales of Growing Up Groovy and Clueless

by Susan Jane Gilman

Overview

From the author of Kiss My Tiara comes a funny and poignant collection of true stories about women coming of age that for once isn't about finding a date.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446679497
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	01/01/2005
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Susan Jane Gilman is the author of Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dressand Kiss My Tiara. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and has written commentary for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Ms. magazine, among others. Her fiction and essays have received several literary awards. Though she lives in Geneva, Switzerland, she remains, eternally, a child of New York.

Editorial Reviews

In Kiss My Tiara, Susan Jane Gilman offered sage instructions on how to rule the world as a smart-mouth goddess. In Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, she describes what it's like to grow up a woman in the contemporary world. In sharp, observant essays, she writes about the awkwardness of adolescence; the constant, dull pain of peer pressure; the serfdom of entry-level employment. The ring of truth; a dash of laughter.

A deliriously, levitatingly funny memoir. Humor columnist Gilman (Kiss My Tiara, not reviewed) may have been girlie and ambitious as a kid, but she always had her subversive, countercultural New York City family to keep those sentiments in perspective. "Heresy had become a family tradition" in the Gilman household, where urban paganism possessed a natural buoyancy. From her parents-once they had pummeled her out of the "fugue of perpetual arousal" that resulted from her discovery of sex-the author acquired a love of life's grotesque ironies, like learning that she had to pay to get in to Auschwitz. The thread of tough humor working its way through this memoir serves to backlight moments of exquisite realization (during puberty "your body starts changing subtly, like a shoreline") and startling, genuine epiphanies: The week she spent visiting concentration camps, the author writes, showed her "how spoiled and ill-equipped I was to cope with the viciousness of the world." She allows us to see how vulnerable and naive a drama queen she can be, but then gets back to the yin and yang of it all, noting that "devoutly religious people made me irritable . . . their rectitude and moral certainty just made me want to act out even more." Gilman is both pathetic and upbeat, sharp and capable of recognizing sharpness in others. At her first job, she spouts a little radical rhetoric and gets a zinger in return: "You know where workers of the world unite? The unemployment line." In what may be the most disarming scene here, this modern anti-bride will fall in love with a full-blown, pouffy white wedding dress. Yes, she will say, there is so much that is ridiculous and passionate and deluded in life-golook in any mirror. It's no great revelation that "all of us could use a good laugh these days," but this author delivers more than just one, and that makes her special. Author tour. Agent: Irene Skolnick/Irene Skolnick Agency

Kirkus Reviews