Stripping + Other Stories (High Risk Books) - Softcover

Kennedy, Pagan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852423226 ISBN 13: 9781852423223

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 1993

Synopsis

A collection of stories about females who don't fit in--each coping with the limits of her life by making up an elaborate and flattering lie about herself so as to escape a helpless situation. "These stories are simple and undramatic, yet subtly provocative."--New York Times Book Review

About this title

Reviews

In this impressive first collection, Kennedy presents a series of quirky but likable girls and women. They are tomboys and daredevils, women who almost get the upper hand with the people (especially men) around them, only to quickly lose hold. A girl at camp submits to others' attempts to make her over, goes to a dance, and ends up with a boy who describes himself as "socially retarded." A 70-year-old woman meets her cousin for the first time in years, in the hopes he too will recall the day, 57 years ago, when his older brother raped her. The common thread all Kennedy's female characters share is their desire to be good girls, to do as their mothers would wish them to. One seven-year-old narrator goes so far in her efforts to please others that she submits to phone sex with an anonymous caller. "Her mother gave her real pills, too: purple ones for going to sleep; a yellow one to ease her through the first day of third grade; a white one when she got too excited about riding the bumper cars at Playland," another protagonist recounts. Deftly detailing their gestures and physical transformations, Kennedy ensures that her characters' turmoils will seem hauntingly familiar to readers.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Despite her cutting-edge credentials--editor of a hip 'zine, star of an offbeat cable show, writer for The Nation and The Village Voice--Kennedy's literary debut is a modest, rather conventional collection of ten stories, a few of which have appeared in The Quarterly, Story Quarterly and VLS. Most of Kennedy's stories, regardless of time or place, record the loss of innocence by young women and girls who don't necessarily regret their passage into adulthood. That can't be said, though, of the narrator of the title piece--an old woman whose life was forever altered when her older cousin raped her many years ago, an incident that has also haunted her other cousin, a helpless witness to the event. In ``The Tunnel,'' a young girl discovers the pleasures of lying when she disobeys her father's warning about running through a dangerous tunnel. The narrator of ``The Dead Rabbits'' recalls a horse-riding accident at age ten, an incident that made her realize her father's inability to protect her from all harm. ``Camp'' and ``The Black Forest'' unerringly capture the drama of girls in search of experience: a young camper who tries to seduce an awkward brainiac like herself; and a naive college freshman who's overwhelmed by her reading of Nietzsche. In the slacker romance of ``UFO,'' a bright young woman realizes that her moody, acid-dropping boyfriend just might be really crazy. A reverse sort of revelation comes in ``Shrinks,'' the story of a young woman raised on mood-altering drugs and psychiatry by her neurotic mother--the daughter realizes she doesn't need either. ``Elvis's Bathroom,'' a knowing look at a funky punk couple (he, a burnt-out case at 30; she, a vivacious 18-year-old) celebrates her guileless enthusiasm for life, and her desire to see the spot where the King died. A winning collection of stories by a beginner worth watching. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Kennedy's tales reduce her characters' lives to their naked realities, warts and all. We meet an odd assortment of life's outsiders, such as, in the title story, an orderly, retired schoolmarm reminding her cousin of one childhood summer when his brother raped her and he watched, only to invent their shared past as a comfort to him and, perhaps, herself: "It was me; I took my own clothes off for him. . . . I was a wild little thing. And when I die, I don't want them to tuck a sheet over me like making a clean bed and think I never had my sins." There are also a punk queen obsessed with visiting the bathroom in which Elvis died in order to fathom the secrets of the supernatural; a nerdy math whiz desperately trying to fit in with her more worldly peers at camp and become a "fallen woman"; and a college freshman renouncing her "Protestant childhood of hot baths and horseback riding" for Nietzsche. Yet in the midst of her voodoo queens and UFOs carrying Love Universe aliens, Kennedy reminds us of our common humanity. Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852423226
• ISBN 13: 9781852423223
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160