- Save $10 when you spend $50 and pay with Bill Me Later. The fast and convenient way to buy without using your credit card. Offer limited to items purchased from Amazon.com between July 14, 2008 and July 21, 2008. One per customer account. Enter code BMLSAVES at checkout. Here's how (restrictions apply)
Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.
|
|||||||||
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Best Value
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff by Rosemary Mahoney  (23)
$16.31
|
Whoredom In Kimmage: The Private Lives of Irish Women by Rosemary Mahoney  (20)
$10.17
|
The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China by Rosemary Mahoney (9)
$10.40
|
The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground by Rosemary Mahoney (9)
|
Her Last Death: A Memoir by Susanna Sonnenberg  (55)
$16.32
|
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In the 1970s, many a precocious American teenager weaned herself on Lillian Hellman's An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time. So what if the author didn't look like her onscreen alter ego, Jane Fonda, in Julia. Few, of course, would have dared to act on their obsession. But Rosemary Mahoney did, telling the chain-smoking, hard-drinking Hellman that she would love to work for her on Martha's Vineyard "in any capacity." Who better to toil for than a star who "glorified bad moods, gave them a glamorous edge, brought them to the level of art"--or so the 17-year-old thought. In a fairy-tale-like development, Hellman took Mahoney on as her part-time housekeeper. But the fairy tale was almost instantly to end, and a more complex saga of innocence, experience, and class to begin.
In the 1970s, many a precocious American teenager weaned herself on Lillian Hellman's An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time. So what if the author didn't look like her onscreen alter ego, Jane Fonda, in Julia. Few, of course, would have dared to act on their obsession. But Rosemary Mahoney did, telling the chain-smoking, hard-drinking Hellman that she would love to work for her on Martha's Vineyard "in any capacity." Who better to toil for than a star who "glorified bad moods, gave them a glamorous edge, brought them to the level of art"--or so the 17-year-old thought. In a fairy-tale-like development, Hellman took Mahoney on as her part-time housekeeper. But the fairy tale was almost instantly to end, and a more complex saga of innocence, experience, and class to begin.
During the summer of 1978, Rose quickly discovered that some bad moods were beyond glorification. Relations between employer and employee were out-of-kilter from the start, since Hellman's version of the job gave "part-time" an entirely new, 24-hour definition. The gig was a far cry from Mahoney's vision of the two of them "sitting at her table together, smoking cigarettes and making toasts to this and that with upraised glasses of a glowing amber drink (never mind that I had had only a few disastrous experiences with smoking and drinking), laughing sagely and discussing books and people and the world and life." Instead Mahoney's dream job was a mixture of tension and tedium as she bumbled around the house and stubbornly refused to admit how much she wanted to be thought worthy. What's more, the teenager felt deeply out of her element amid such Vineyard glitterati as William and Rose Styron, James Taylor and Carly Simon. Some might find her descriptions of the increasingly infirm Hellman less than generous, but the older Mahoney is very much watching herself in the wings and finding her younger self just as wanting. A Likely Story is a cautionary tale about adoration and celebrity from one of our more gifted journalists--each scene literally leaps off the page, fraught with emotion recollected not entirely in tranquillity. --Kerry Fried
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The tribulations suffered by a 17-year-old girl working for a stubborn, acerbic 73-year-old woman may sound like a potential whine-fest. But when the narrator is a writer as gifted as Mahoney, and the older woman is none other than Lillian Hellman, the story becomes a compelling chronicle not only of an intergenerational combat of will and manners, but also of that terrible, wavering period of late adolescence when nothing is certain, and frustrations are legion. Although not at all domestic, Mahoney jumped at a chance to be Hellman's "part-time live-in housekeeper." But Martha's Vineyard became Mahoney's Omaha Beach, as she battles to keep emotionally intact. Less interesting is a tendency for the author to overwrite, often resorting to a repetitive excess of detailAe.g., there's only so much of the rather ghastly descriptions of Hellman's yellow buck teeth, failing, fishlike eyes and pallid sagging skin the reader can stand. The condescension that Mahoney occasionally displayed in the NBCC-finalist Whoredom in Kimmage is still here, although since it's directed at Hellman and a few pompous individuals, it's more understandable. More deeply affecting than Hellman's shocking tantrums and relentless egomania are Mahoney's recollections of her own childhood. These describe the heartrending struggle of a caring, devoted child for a hopelessly dysfunctional mother. Her memories, reflecting on how Nora Mahoney's awful desperation was countered by her wit, humanity and passion, create a telling juxtaposition with the detestable self-absorption and pettiness of the sniping, spoiled Hellman. First serial to Vanity Fair and Elle.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|