The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright

by Jean Nathan

Overview

In 1957, a children's book called The Lonely Doll was published. With its pink-and-white-checked cover and photographs featuring a wide-eyed doll, it captured the imaginations of young girls and made the author, Dare Wright, a household name. Close to forty years after its publication, the book was out of print but not forgotten. When the cover image inexplicably came to journalist Jean Nathan one afternoon, she went in search of the book—and ultimately its author. Nathan found Dare Wright living out her last days in a decrepit public hospital in Queens, New York. Over the next five years, Nathan pieced together Dare Wright's bizarre life of glamour and painful isolation to create this mesmerizing biography of a woman who struggled to escape the imprisonment of her childhood through her art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312424923
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	08/01/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Jean Nathan graduated from Williams College and the Columbia School of Journalism. She was a staff writer for The New York Observer and a senior editor at Connoisseur magazine. She has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Travel & Leisure, Vogue, and other publications. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

From The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll:

Mostly, when Edie had to be out in the world, Dare was left at home alone. There, she learned to find comfort and companionship in her books and her dolls, and to fire up her imagination. If Dare's first dolls were improvisational, homemade, the books Edie bought Dare when she was feeling flush were the real thing. The first two she purchased were a collection of Grimm's fairy tales and a picture book called The Lovely Garden, the story of the much-beloved Princess Yolande who lives on the Island of Can-be-done, whose "sweet smile seemed to say: 'What am I here for if it is not to make others happier?'" The book's message was reminiscent of her mother's inscriptions on the backs of her portraits-"To my Good and Precious Daughter"-directives on how to act and so meet the conditions of Edie's love. But the mechanics of fairy tales carried a message, too. If princesses could be put to sleep and awaken unharmed, perhaps fathers and brothers could also. If princesses could escape punishing circumstances, perhaps Dare could, too.

Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions
1. Why did Dare Wright never rebel or in any way try to loosen or escape her mother's grip on her? How might Dare's story have been different if she had taken her friend's advice and gone on to college as did so many of her classmates at the Laurel School?
2. Why is it too simple to view Edith Stevenson Wright as a monster?
3. For those familiar with Dare Wright's books for children, how does knowing Dare Wright's personal story cause you to rethink her books?
4. In many ways, Dare Wright's story is so much of its time. Dare's parents divorce in 1919, for example, came at a time when divorce was quite uncommon. Dare's mother Edie felt disgraced by this. A woman today would not need to feel such a sense of shame. Also, far fewer women were the sole support of their family. Could this story happen today?
5. Dare and Blaine's parallel stories are reminiscent of what is said about twins separated at birth, even though they were, in fact, separated at ages three and five. Both siblings never had sustained intimate relationships, neither married, both hid from the world to a large extent. What forces were at work that this should be so?
6. Why could Edie and her son never reconcile?
7. Why could Dare never bring herself to any real intimacy with a man? And why could Blaine never do that with a woman?
8. The mother-daughter relationship between Edie and Dare was extreme. Are there other stories in literature and film that relate?
9. Dare was exceptionally cut off from her feelings, or found ways to bury them. How did Dare's alcoholism transform her—beyond the obvious ways?
10. How would the experience and impact of this book have been different without the photographs that document every period of Dare Wright's life?
11. By including her own story in the book's epilogue, the author explains why The Lonely Doll was so important to her as a child. Do you think the author did well to add in this part?
12. What are some of the books from your childhood that haunt you or had as powerful a hold on you as The Lonely Doll had on Jean Nathan?

13. What do you think Edie Wright would have thought of this book? And Dare?

Editorial Reviews

Although I never read The Lonely Doll as a child or saw Dare Wright's photographs, it's as if I somehow did. Nathan has done an amazing job to capture Wright's life on the page and to bring us into the household of one of the saddest dysfunctional families ever.” —Cindy Sherman

“Splendid...Nathan's detective work is admirable as is the care with which she traces Wright's psychic decay. Even readers who never felt Edith's spell will be captivated—and perhaps, unsettled—by this modern gothic tale.” —Michelle Green, People (4 stars)

“Compelling psychological biography...Nathan's meticulously researched, well-documented biography...illuminates Wright's tangled and tragic life, work and times.” —Neal Wyatt, Library Journal

“[Nathan's] sympathetic, graceful style seems appropriate for this private, elusive figure who kept such porous boundaries between her real and imaginary worlds.” —Joy Press, The Village Voice

“Thoroughly engrossing, and fans of The Lonely Doll series will want to read her terrific—and terrifically disturbing—life story...Readers of this dark and haunting biography will never be able to look at The Lonely Doll books, or their author, in quite the same way again.” —Rebecca Maksel, San Francisco Chronicle

“A probing and profound new biography...in Ms. Nathan's sensitive hands, Wright's fate takes on a certain fluttering romance—an indignant poetry.” —Alexandra Fuller, The New York Observer

“Nathan's dexterous writing sees around the corners of Dare Wright's life to show that behind 0her perhaps perverse books was a childlike effort at life that was both futile and bold.” —Benjamin Lyntal, The New York Sun

“Sensational though Nathan's subject matter is...she never descends into exploitation. Her deft handling of these horrors recalls David and Albert Maysles' 1976 documentary Grey Gardens.” —L D Beghtol, Time Out (New York)

From the Publisher

New York journalist Nathan rescues from oblivion the enigmatic author of a beloved, politically incorrect children's book. Dare Wright died at age 86 in a state nursing home on Roosevelt Island.That was in 2001-44 years after the publication of The Lonely Doll launched her popular (and exceedingly weird) children's book series. Born in Canada, Wright was brought up mostly in Cleveland, where her divorced mother Edie tenaciously made a living as a portrait painter. Dare enjoyed a fairly glamorous adult life in Manhattan in the '50s and '60s, first as a photographer, fashion model, and actress, then as the author of numerous Edith and the Bears books. Yet the story Nathan doggedly pursues is of the steely umbilical bond between artistically driven, egotistical mother and beautiful, submissive, obedient daughter. Edie and Dare did everything together: they traveled as a pair, collaborated in work, fended off importunate admirers, even slept in the same bed. Their parents' 1919 divorce traumatized both four-year-old Dare and her seven-year-old brother Blaine, who was sent away to live with his alcoholic father. Only in their late 20s did the siblings finally reunite, spending long vacations together in upstate New York and negotiating prickly truces between son and mother, who vied for Dare's attention. This sad, triangular drama was enacted for the rest of their lives, as none of the Wrights seemed to need intimacy outside the threesome. Dare's fetish for her doll, Edith-funny how similar that name is to Mom's-led her to develop, with Edie's help, a story in photographs (complete with spanking scenes), which she painstakingly composed like a fashion shoot. Legions of fans cherished TheLonely Doll and subsequent books, though their affection couldn't ease Dare's bitter old age, soaked in alcohol following Edie's and Blaine's deaths. Nathan's straightforward account somewhat dryly sticks to the facts, allowing the curious and very lovely photographs that Dare and her mother took of each other over a lifetime to tell much of the story. Fascinating mother-daughter symbiosis makes this a Freudian feast.

Kirkus Reviews