Some Personal Papers [Paperback]

JoAllen Bradham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1998

When the director of a children's services organization encounters a severely retarded boy living in a state of severe abuse, she remembers her father's words at her deformed brother's funeral. She realizes that love and compassion dictate but one course of action. An unlikely story of a woman "guilty by reason of charity".

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I'm not quite sure whether I love this book or hate it, but it won't be very easy to forget." -- Madison Smartt Bell, Series Final Judge

"In addition to being a wonderfully written narrative, this novel is a document to social commentary that all Americans should read." -- Paul Ruffin, Co-Editor of the Series

"Narrated by its enigmatic, deeply troubled, yet strangely likable heroine, this smoothly written tale grabs the reader in the opening pages and will not let go. JoAllen Bradham is a remarkably talented writer." -- Greg Johnson

In the Garden of Good and Evil

Some Personal Papers is the story of Miss Genie and her beautiful/terrible garden. Like all good literature, JoAllen Bradham's novel takes us where we haven't been. "Take" is too mild a verb; Miss Genie's voice doesn't take us--it yanks us into the world of public housing, caseworkers, and dysfunctional parents. The reader is challenged, faced with deciding if Miss Genie, respected director of children's services in a large Georgia city, is a clear-minded benefactor or a madwoman and victim of her own circumstances, or some of each.

Miss Genie's garden forces us to consider the way we as a society handle the children of disaster. Are we acting sensibly in our attempts to deal with the problems of Americas underclass? On a broader scale, what about euthanasia and suicide as logical responses to insurmountable handicaps? Some Personal Papers deserves one of the best compliments a book can be given: It makes the reader think.

Although Bradham's prose is much tighter than Faulkner's, the complexity of her protagonist's character approaches the multifaceted personalities in Faulkners best work. Eugenia Putnam is a figure who would be at home in Light in August, for example.

Bradham, professor of English at Kennesaw College in Marietta, Georgia, won the 1994 Texas Review Southern and Southwestern Novelists Breakthrough Competition for this novel. -- Dan Gordon, Vanderbilt Magazine, Winter 1996

From the Author

Some Personal Papers: ONE BOOK--TWO SHOCKS

Words take revenge. Mine chirp up like open-mouthed baby birds from the nest of memory. One rises from the high school conversation in which I specified I wanted to write. The other is my adamant reiteration in the tenth grade that picture shows were not real art. I've recovered from my cinematic stupidity, but did my adolescent delusion pronounce a curse?

This question would never have come up except that with Some Personal Papers, I put myself in peril. As soon as the novel won the 1994 Texas Breakthrough Award in Southern and Southwestern Fiction, the local papers ran a couple of features. Members of the community who certainly never keep up with literary doings suddenly knew about me and the book. I was delighted with their good wishes, until I realized they thought only in terms of movies or television. "Who will play Miss Genie in the movie?" became a constant. From that repeated question I realized that a piece of literary fiction was meaningless to a screen-glued world. I, who promulgated during high school that motion pictures were marginally declasse, confronted the truth that if my book did not quickly metamorphose into film, neither it nor I had any class at all.

Closer in time is my denunciation of TV. For twenty years I've lived in a TV-free home. Once, mid-way, I faltered and purchased. On a Sunday evening, when the sky was overcast but not stormy and the set had been here three weeks, I turned it on. BLAM! Lightning! A direct hit! What could I conclude? After ten years, I had succumbed and sat myself, worshipper style, before the Golden Calf of a TV, dallied in its lures, albeit briefly, and then witnessed its fall. The hand that smote the gaudy box with its orange faces into a tan plastic husk was, literally, as fast as lightning, was, in fact, lightning. It seemed perfectly clear that God was intoning from the skies above Georgia: "No. Thou shalt not have an idiot box. BAD. Go and TV no more."

With Some Personal Papers out, folks around the community started with "When will this be on TV?" or "This is a perfect made-for-TV movie." When, over a year later, the novel had the good fortune to win the 1996 Townsend Prize, the responses intensified:

--I know they'll make a movie now!
--Will they shoot it here in Georgia?
--Since it's a short book, we can see it on TV in one evening!

So it goes. Without a film, nothing.

The idea that a book is at best a halfway house on the way to Tinseltown accounted for one shock, but ways of reading delivered the real zinger. Back in high school, when I was promising to write and playing the intellectual snob, I did have enough sense to know I had to make a living and determined to become a college English professor. This was the compromise position, a compromise that snapped as trap. In graduate school, the New Criticism was still hanging on, at least where I was, and I absorbed all the injunctions of close reading. I knew that plot was the least thing, that allusions, images and setting, structure and mythopoeic patterns, archetypes and other such erudite matters constituted literary art.

Because Id taught so many college students and also had a pretty reliable idea of the number of students whod gone through college English courses with instructors similarly trained, I lived under the blissful assumption that everyone read critically. Wrong. As I conducted book clubs, fielded questions, and led discussions on and off college campuses, folks would say, "Tell us about yourself," or "What is the moral message here?" or "How does this help with my life?" All those years in the classroom I thought I'd said last rites over this kind of reading. I expected to converse with those who knew writing from the inside. Not so. In meeting after meeting, heres what I found:

--Was your father a minister? How else could you know the Bible?
--What message are you sending?
--Is this book a political statement?
--This is depressing! I HATE to read depressing things.
--You use "I." I thought the "I" meant the writer.

Such responses staggered me. I thought everyone, right off, would see the construction of Eden I'd wrought. Picking up the name symbolism should be a piece of cake. Didn't I always expect to find name symbolism? Hadn't I taught name symbolism to thousands? Hadn't my contemporaries taught name symbolism to millions? Foolishly, I assumed that my readers would know why one character is conspicuous for tactile imagery and immediately read the book aright. Silly me.

Thus the second shock zapped me. All those years I'd spent teaching had been wasted. Furthermore, since my friends and colleagues all over the country had been following the same procedures, we'd all failed. Almost everyone, it seemed, dropped critical reading before the ink dried on the final exam and reverted to plot or pithy passages for better living.

And now--shockproof--what am I doing? Two things: Bracing up for TV- and film-directed questions now that Black Belt Press has published this new edition of Some Personal Papers and working on other books. Art is long; funny questions, short. Hope springs eternal.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 164 pages
• Publisher: Black Belt Press (November 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1881320952
• ISBN-13: 978-1881320951
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,315,857 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Some Personal Papers, August 13, 2000

By 

Marian A. Bickenbach (Powder Springs, GA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Some Personal Papers (Paperback)

Some Personal Papers, which recently garnered author, JoAllen Bradham, the Georgia Fiction Writer of the Year Award, is a must read. This exquisitely told story is about Eugenia Putman, "Miss Genie," a dedicated social worker who is forced to make choices regarding the children in her personal care that few of us could ever make. This is a case of when "doing what's best" is, without a doubt, a case of "doing what's worst," but for all of the right reasons. Although it has often been said that actions speak louder than words, Miss Genie's actions cannot even be considered without first reading her story in her own words, words that scream at you about the often painful experience that is life for many people, and particularly for children. This is a story you will not soon forget.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read!, October 27, 1999

By 

Ann Hearn (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Some Personal Papers (Paperback)

This novel is just as JoAllen herself said; "It's a quick read, and a long think."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Probing, poetic, powerful, November 4, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Some Personal Papers (Hardcover)

The press may specialize in books about the South, but the book itself deserves the attention of readers everywhere. Those who read for significant, thought-rpvoking subject matter will find it. Those who read for artistic method will rejoice.