Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? - Softcover

Elyse Gascó

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330482491 ISBN 13: 9780330482493

Publisher: Picador, 2001

Synopsis

From this funny, wise, and fresh new voice comes a collection of eight stories about adoption and birth, parents and children

The Real True Story is a powerful, poignant collection of thematically interwoven stories about relationships between parents and children, especially mothers and daughters. Each story explores the complex and often volatile terrain of adoption and birth. We meet young adopted women who yearn for the sense of family that blood ties bring, and mothers who struggle with the decision to give their babies up. A grown woman who was adopted tries to imagine her birth mother's life, a young girl is abducted by her father and shares a series of strange adventures with him, a teenage mother plans to give up her newborn, a pregnant wife considers abortion. Edgy, urban, bold and vibrant, The Real True Story marks the emergence of a young writer who understands the human heart and the secret lives of ordinary people.

About this title

Review

Elyse Gasco's debut collection is a novel take on an oft-explored subject: mother-daughter relationships. These eight interrelated stories all examine adoption from several perspectives. In "A Well-Imagined Life," the narrator is a young woman trying to imagine the woman who gave her up; in "You Have the Body," she is an adopted woman about to give birth to her own child; and in the title story, the character is about to give up her baby for adoption. Each of these tales offers a unique perspective on the parent-child bond; unfortunately, almost all of them are written in the oppressively self-conscious second-person--a literary tic that can be more distracting than effective. Fantasizing late at night about alternatives to her impending motherhood, for example, the unnamed narrator of "You Have the Body" imagines running away:

Soon, you will be skinny again. You will only wear dresses. You will never be afraid of strangers. You will drink men under the table and sleep with college freshmen. They will read to you excitedly from their textbooks, their cheeks still raw from shaving too fast. You will take a woman lover and live in North Africa with a turban wrapped around your head.

No doubt Gasco's intention is to catapult us willy-nilly into the character's innermost thoughts; unfortunately, page upon page of this relentless, in-your-face you you you more often than not drives the reader in the opposite direction. (Sleep with college freshmen, you protest. Hell, no!) Applied judiciously, this literary gimmick might have worked; using it in six out of the eight stories, however, is definite overkill. Indeed, the strongest story in the collection, "Mother: Not a True Story," is written in the third person. Here Gasco crafts a deft, darkly humorous portrait of an adoptive mother who creates a fictional birth mother for her dissatisfied teenaged daughter. Perhaps the best way to read Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? is intermittently, so as to enjoy Elyse Gasco's passion and point of view without getting run over by her style. --Alix Wilber

About the Author

Elyse Gasco was born in Montreal and lives there currently. She has degrees in Creative Writing from Condordia University and New York University. She is the recipient of the Journey Prize, Canada's most prestigious award for short fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0330482491
• ISBN 13: 9780330482493
• Binding: Paperback