Rules for Saying Goodbye: A Novel - Hardcover

Taylor, Katherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374252718 ISBN 13: 9780374252717

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Synopsis

“Kath is curious,” observes her younger brother, Ethan, not without anxiety. She is thirteen; already everyone can see she’s got her eye on bigger things than provincial Fresno can offer. Years in the glamorous chill of an East Coast prep school will introduce her to a razor-sharp sense of social distinction, cocaine “so good it’s pink,” and an indispensable best friend—all that she needs to prepare for life in Manhattan. There will be fourteen-dollar cocktails but no money for groceries; unsuitable men of enormous charm, and unsuitable jobs of no charm at all; and a wistful yearning for a transformation from someone of promise into someone of genius.

In this deliciously witty and affecting debut novel, fiction winks at real life: Katherine Taylor is its muddled heroine, and also its author. Written in the tradition of Curtis Sittenfeld and Melissa Bank, with the gorgeous hues of a pile of Gatsby’s shirts, Rules for Saying Goodbye is a bittersweet yet comic coming-of-age tale that has an unerring feel for the delights and malaises of a generation.

About this title

About the Author

Katherine Taylor has won a Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares. Much like her fictional alter ego, she has burned bridges in London, Rome, and Brussels, but now lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

Katherine Taylor's debut features a narrator named Katherine Taylor, whose rebellious mother sends her from Fresno to Manhattan's fictional Claver prep at age 13. The madcap, fast-forward shenanigans that follow read like Auntie Mame à la A.M. Homes. Rich Claver friend Page gets pregnant and develops a coke habit. Katherine gets a Columbia M.F.A. but lacks drive, tending bar at an exclusive hotspot while trying not to deal with her abrasive mom. Katherine's brother, Ethan, a gay actor, rooms with her in her cheap uptown digs until he becomes "the face of Diet Coke." There's ambivalent romance that involves a move to London. Claver friend Clarissa gets cancer as she turns 30. When a nutty neighbor threatens to kill Katherine, police advise vacating, but "giving up a rent-controlled apartment to save your life is as ridiculous as living in Queens." While a lot of what Katherine does is familiar, Taylor is a superb satirist, eviscerating everyone in her Katherine's path. In the middle of the novel she drops a list of "rules for saying goodbye"; it's extraneous, even precious, and it's the best thing in the book: e.g., "Once you are gone, be gone for good." Taylor manages to make worn New York yarns feel fresh again. (June)
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

 

Preparing for Power

 

I knew how to listen in on the telephone extension without anyone hearing a click. Until I left home, my mother never, ever had a private conversation. Eavesdropping was my hobby. I enjoyed it more than kicking a soccer ball against the side of the garage to see how much stucco I could knock off and more than stripping bark from the oaks in our front yard with the claw of a hammer.

 

If I put just my thumb over the receiver, I could breathe as loud as I wanted, even during the winter with a sinus infection, and no one could hear.

 

“That is not the point. You are not getting the point.”

 

“You should have never asked him. You should have just taken the car.”

 

“Last time I did that, I wrecked it. Do you remember?”

 

“Did you?”

 

“I dented the wheel well against the median.”

 

“It’s your car, too.”

 

“Listen, I am coming to the point.”

 

“The point is you love him.”

 

“Yes,” Mother said. “Yes, I adore him.”

 

Other people’s conversations were more reassuring than unraveling hand-knitted sweaters and more interesting than the stack of old correspondence in my father’s closet. Sitting in the dark of the phone closet off the entryway, with the receiver to my ear, when I was nine, ten, eleven, twelve, I learned the details of mutual funds and mortgage payments, how friendships disintegrate, and the common complaints of a marriage. I knew before anyone had mentioned the topic that my mother planned for me to go to boarding school.

 

“She can’t go to school here in Fresno,” she told Auntie Petra.

 

Auntie Petra was two hundred pounds overweight and taught second grade in Compton. The corners of her Venice Beach apartment were piled high with Reader’s Digest and Life. She talked with food in her mouth. “What’s wrong with school there?”

 

“Don’t get me started on what’s wrong. You don’t have enough time for what’s wrong.”

 

“Give me one reason she can’t go to school there.”

 

“Because,” my mother whispered, as if I might be outside her door and not downstairs listening from the phone closet, “this horrible little town is full of horrible little people.”

 

 

That summer I was eleven my mother had a terminal argument with her best friend from college. Afterwards, she loathed our little town more than ever, so she and I drove to San Francisco for a weekend to buy autumn overcoats and to eat lunch and dinner in the high-ceilinged hotel restaurants that made my mother happy.

 

“Why did you argue with Alice?” I asked her. I had picked up that conversation in the middle, and I couldn’t determine exactly what had caused the row.

 

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” she said.

 

“How much older?”

 

“Fifteen.”

 

“Fifteen is too long to wait. I want to know now.”

 

“I’m not telling you now.”

 

“But I’ll forget to ask when I’m fifteen.”

 

“You never forget anything,” she said.

 

We drove past the still windmills in the foothills before Berkeley. “Look at those,” my mother said. “What a scam. Have we ever seen them moving?”

 

Our first day in San Francisco, the rain started. Mother and I parked the car at the hotel and walked together through the wet summer afternoon, under the department store awnings around Union Square. She was very slender then, and men turned their heads to stare at her. I was tall for eleven, so when my mother and I walked together, I imagined people might think we were sisters or intimate friends, leaning into each other and speaking close.

 

“Tell me about your argument,” I whispered to her as we dodged animal rights activists outside Gump’s.

 

“Fifteen is not so long to wait,” she said. “It will give us something to talk about later.”

 

“I hate later.”

 

When the rain turned to a downpour, we shrieked as we ran from awning to awning. My new ballet slippers, which I insisted upon wearing at all times, were ruined. The city became a vibrant gray. We shook the rain off the ends of our fingertips. Our summer-weight overcoats were soaked straight through. We stopped, eventually, in a department store café, wet and cold and thinking the whole thing was a lot of fun, and I drank my first cappuccino.

 

“Listen,” Mother said, taking off her coat, “what would you think about going away?”

 

“Away where?” I knew exactly away where.

 

“To school. In Massachusetts, if you’d like. Or Switzerland, if that’s not too far away.”

 

“When?”

 

“Whenever you like. Next year.”

 

When I was eleven, I had a very hard time telling dreams from reality. I didn’t understand why other people couldn’t remember conversations I knew we had had the day before, or why one day my backyard was a landing strip for warplanes and the next day was just fig trees. I once broke my wrist jumping off the fireplace mantel. Sometimes I could fly and sometimes I couldn’t. I had long daydreams about what came after the farms and the boredom of central California, and more than once I had packed a suitcase to seek my fortune, like the three little pigs who left home in the children’s book. “I want to very much,” I said.

 

“Really?” She seemed surprised and relieved.

 

“I want to very much.”

 

“I want you to,” she whispered in excitement. “I want you to go,” she said. “You have more to offer than Fresno is prepared to accept.”

 

“I am almost twelve,” I whispered right back at her.

 

“Yes,” she said. “I think you’re ready. But your father won’t like that at all.” She smiled.

 

We left the café. The rain stopped and we walked along. She held my hand in her pocket. Her dark hair was curly from the damp. Men turned to get a good look at her.

 

 

In the fall, I applied to only one boarding school. “If you don’t get into the best one, you don’t want to go, do you?” If I did not get into the best one, my mother did not want me to go. Nothing but the absolute top was satisfactory for Mother.

 

At that time, The Claver School had one faculty member for every three and a quarter students. My mother had read various books on prep schools, books with titles like Preparing for Power and Casualties of Privilege, and had discerned that Claver was the best in the nation. The brochure for the school showed silky-haired girls in mahogany-paneled classrooms and relaxed young men in blue jackets coming out of the Gothic Revival chapel. There were photographs of students reading books beneath trees in the spring, and attractive, focused people on cross-country skis. There were exotic court sports to learn, like squash and fives. There was crew to row on the river through the forest and Oscar Wilde to be performed in the intimate auditorium of the school hall. The brochure included Claver’s list of notable alumni, featuring two presidents and dozens of other important historical and political figures.

 

“What if I want to be a rock star?” I asked my mother.

 

“You can do anything you want to do,” she assured me. “Just get out of this town first.”

 

Over the next few months, my father ignored the process of applying and test-taking and the rounds of local and on-site interviews. It never crossed his mind that I might, in fact, get in. We had letters written by the soccer coach and the art teacher and, when my standardized test scores turned out very low, by the psychiatrist in Berkeley who had administered my IQ test. My mother sent off a box of newspaper clippings proclaiming my achievements in sports and the civic light opera, paintings I had done of my brothers eating breakfast, copies of my plays the local children’s theater had performed. I didn’t think much about what might happen if I was accepted. After my bad test scores, I stopped imagining what boarding school might be like. There was no fraught period of waiting for a response, as there was really no point in waiting for anything.

 

I spent afternoons silently listening in on telephone calls or throwing a tennis ball on the roof to see if I could displace any of the red Mexican tiles.

 

My brothers sensed something was going on. Richard, who normally threw tantrums but tended not to be downright destructive, smashed all my dollhouse furniture the weekend that our mother took me to Boston for interviews. My cheerful six-year-old brother...

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374252718
• ISBN 13: 9780374252717
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320