Is This What Other Women Feel Too? (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) - Hardcover

Seese, June A

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0916583821 ISBN 13: 9780916583828

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991

Synopsis

June Akers Seese's second novel is about books and the people who read them: it's about a rare-book dealer and his mistress, set in that era when words like "mistress" were still used, and recalling the years when Lenny Bruce, Edith Piaf, and Freud might share the same paragraph in an after-hours night spot. Seese writes movingly, tightly, without recourse to adjectives, from the gut and to the gut.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Slender, quietly compelling second novel (What Waiting Really Means, 1990) in which a middle-aged woman, gathering wisdom along the way, looks back over a troubled past. In her early 40s, Kate has at last reached a point where she is ``finally concentrating on what I can see and touch,'' having learned that ``life isn't a jigsaw puzzle'' in which everything, including love affairs, must connect. She recalls her often difficult and mostly unhappy journey to this point in a series of letters to and from Parker, a friend, and in a series of first- person narratives. A student in late 1950's Detroit (when ``Hemingway was the big gun in the English Department, but Lady Chatterley was passed around''), Kate fell in love with 56-year-old Francis, a bookseller with an invalid wife. He loved Kate, she believes, because old men can pretend better with a young woman; but then Francis died suddenly, and she fled Detroit for a small town. Deeply depressed, she began seeing a psychiatrist, to whom she described her unhappy and disturbed childhood, her devastation at the loss of Francis, and her unsatisfactory affairs with men as troubled as herself. Gradually--and this is revealed best in the letters--Kate begins to heal. She starts a reading group for black teenagers, which she continues as the riots devastate the city to which she has recently returned. A new love affair and a willingness to make friends give her finally a measure of tranquillity--which might sound like an easy psychobabble solution, but Seese is too intelligent and too good a writer for something as trite as that. An ordinary story of an ordinary woman made memorable by the author's wry sense of humor, honesty, and eye for human foibles. Small but good. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

"We all wore bras in 1954." So begins Detroit native Kate McGhee's journal-like reminiscences in Akers Seese's ( What Waiting Really Means ) touching--at times jarring--second novel. Kate reveals her story through a combination of devices: correspondence with her girlfriend Parker who works in publishing in racy New York, snatches of conversation with her analyst, Dr. Koltonow, and brief entries in her own telling voice. After the death of her older lover, Kate finds solace in reading and becomes a librarian. At Parker's urging, she turns to psychoanalysis and struggles with a depression rooted in her traumatic childhood; later she begins a journal-writing group for school dropouts. From bra-stuffing to Janis Joplin, e. e. cummings to Lenny Bruce, Neutrogena soap to the race riots in Detroit, well-chosen details give texture to the characters' lives. Kate's depression is painful but her attitude never entirely humorless, and the counterpoint between her sometimes resigned, generally cynical (but always intelligent) voice and the snappy letters from Parker keeps the pace brisk. The novel ends ambiguously, both hopeful and a drop despairing.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0916583821
• ISBN 13: 9780916583828
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160