Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Oh, I hope someone knows this because I totally want to read it!

GAH. I wrote this on the wrong post. Sorry.

I don’t read romance unless there are explosions, car chases, headless zombies and/or Japanese swords.

But I want to read THIS! Someone, please find this book. Please.

My captcha: youre49. How did you…Hey!

Velvet Dreams by Patricia Werner??
Blurb
“Amanda Whitney’s mother is determined to marry her fiercely independent daughter off - preferably to a title. But Amanda harbors dreams of romance, and vows she will only wed for love. Edward Pemberton, the Duke of Sunderland, has sworn off love forever. He is short of funds, and has come to America, quite simply, to marry an heiress. They couldn’t be more wrong for each other. Yet he is irresistibly intrigued by her spirited beauty and she finds his rakish charms impossible to resist. Form the gilded ballrooms of New York to the magnificent estates of Newport, from the dazzling salons of Paris to exotic Monte Carlo, they become partners in a dizzying dance of desire - bound by a love stronger than any fantasy…”

Hunting down “Velvet Dreams” in 3…2…1…

Ack!
This sounds really exciting, but for a Belgium girl like me, hunting it down will be all crazingly expensive again. Nevertheless, here we go!

Definitely want to read this. Now.

I’ve got to read this, too! Sounds great. I’m tired of it being so “easy” for the hero and the heroine giving in because she can’t figure out what to do!

Oh, for the days when a romantic heroine could have a varied sex life and no one swooned away in horror…I think I’ll find this one!

Looks like the author was trying to give the courtship—if you could call it that—between Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlborough a fictional HEA. Alas, in real life, Consuelo caved in to Mommy, the duke turned out to be a scurvy knave, and they were scandalously divorced a decade or so later.

Consuelo did, however, coin the phrase “heir and the spare,” so it wasn’t all for nothing.

Edie YOU ROCK!! It is Velvet Dreams by Patricia Werner!  You guys need to check out the cover, that has to be one of the most uncomfortable poses I’ve ever seen.

And as for why this book didn’t get me immediately hooked on romance . . . what can I say?  I was 12, and some people are slower than others.

This is going on my wishlist. I’ve just gone through a few romances with butthole heroes and I’m ready for a sympathetic one

This sounds amazing! Just ordered a copy of my own and can’t wait to read it!

Where did you see the cover? Nothing i can find via google has it.

Where did you see the cover? Nothing i can find via google has it.

Is this the one?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300369254316

Ah, thanks.

WOOT

I finally got one! *happychairdance*

I knew all those years of typing out blurbs before I discovered most of them were online would come in handy for more than improving my typing speed. LOL

I just ordered it!

The cover is awesome. I’m really digging the purple silk vest on the hero, and the heroine’s blue eyeshadow is certainly “fiercely independent”...
That, and the fact that her neck is “fiercely independent” of her body.

On Amazon it looks like this author has quite a few category romances from Zebra under her name.  Another great cover of hers has the couple emerging from the center of a Mandolin?  Guess that means he’s got a really big instrument…..xxoocf

Reminds me of Edith Wharton’s “The Buccaneers” with some sex thrown in.  The “buccaneers” of the title were rich American girls married off to impoverished titled Englishmen who were not too fussy about whom they married.  Edith was born into one of New York’s old money families, so she had the opportunity to observe marriages like the Vanderbilt fiasco at close hand.  “The Buccaneers” came out in 1938, 12 years after the marriage was annulled and 32 years after the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough separated in 1906.  I’m sure their story inspired a lot of fiction.

Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers makes great reading, especially for those of us who enjoy historical romances that involve American heroines and English heroes.  Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie Randolph, was also a “buccaneer”—a rich American heiress who was married into the English aristocracy.  Like most of those marriages, it was not a happy one, and once Jennie had provided the “heir and a spare” in the form of Winston and his older brother, she and her husband “led their own lives” as the euphemism goes.

I’m thinking that Jenny Jerome probably was a more likely inspiration for Wharton’s book.  She married a younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough.  Consuelo married the 9th Duke.  Local connection - I live in Arizona, and there is a town called Jerome, named after the owner of the copper mine that was the main industry there.  The Jerome family was very prominent in NY society circles, and The Buccanneers was an unfinished manuscript that was published after Wharton’s death, so who knows how long it had been lying around before it was finished off and published a year after her death.  Funny how the genre lines blur when it come to writers like Wharton.  Why is she “Literature” with a capital L, when most of her stories are pure romance, and historical romance at that?  Is it because she palled around with the likes of Henry James?

Why is she “Literature” with a capital L, when most of her stories are pure romance, and historical romance at that?

Well, for one thing, if you’re looking for a HEA, don’t read Wharton! The House of Mirth will leave you depressed for a week.

What I love about her is her ability to depict that particular society—fin de siecle New York and Europe—in all its complexity, and without the rose-shaded spectacles. She lived it; she knew its cast of characters; she knew its hypocrisies. And she was a brilliant writer: she could turn from satire to pathos on a dime.

Wharton’s not so much with the HEA—in fact, I don’t think any of her stories end happily. And a HEA is pretty much a requirement for Romance. Most of literature is about relationships, but I require a HEA, or at least a HFN for me to consider it Romance (with a capital R).

I’d say she’s Literature with a capital L because we still read her so many years on, and she did phenomenal things with the English language. I’m personally not really willing to apply Literature with a capital L to most of what’s printed in the last 30 years, since there’s just no way to predict what will continue to speak and be read after its moment (and that’s pretty much my grounds for is it or isn’t it Literature). The literariest of literary fiction that’s never touched ten years on isn’t Literature either, to me.

I think The Buccaneers is the only Wharton that ends with what one might even conceivably describe as a HEA.

Yowzah!  I am so getting this book!!!!

Well, the main-ish character of the Buccaneers is supposed to run off with her true love, and there’s Big Scandal. I guess that’s happier than being stuck in a loveless marriage, but it’s not really a HEA. Plus, Wharton died before she finished the novel, so who knows how close to her outline she’d have stayed. My guess is the lovers would have been united but in ignominy. Cuz no one in a Wharton novel has it all.

I love Wharton, but wow is the world a sad place after reading one of her novels.

I love this thread.  Much of Literary Fiction (read by insistence in college) is simply too sad and depressing for me.  Even Oprahs lite LF does not have a place in my work a day world.  If I lived in a candy cotton world maybe—but my world is hard and I love the relaxation/relief I get from my TRASH. xxoocf

@Cfarley - We have a running joke in my family about the Oprah Book Club.  One of my family members just LOVES tragic books with lots of pain and “deep thought”.  Pretty much anything on the Oprah Book Club, really.  So half of us start laughing whenever Oprah has a new addition.

“Oh, Kathy would LOVE it!”  It makes for easy gifting.

I think the only book I ever really, truly enjoyed from OBC was Pillars of the Earth, and I read it years before she added it to the club.

Yeah, saying The Buccaneers sorta has an HEA is sorta stretching it, but it’s more true of that one than Wharton’s other novels!

I wrote a fairly depressing short story in a creative writing class, and was asked by the teacher “if I had been reading Ethan Frome again.”  LOL

True.

I took a few creative writing classes in college, and one of the things I remember most clearly was that no one, but NO ONE, was writing light stuff. It was all madness, sad breakups, alienation, and rape. I left each class wondering if the topics were reflections of people’s actual lives, or just what they thought a lot about or thought was what you were supposed to write about in a creative fiction class. It was pretty depressing. I wish I could confess to being the sole voice dedicated to humor in the class, but I was part of the alienation camp.

Thank you for opening my eyes to the fact that there is no HEA in Literature.  I’m planning to take that concept to the Yahoo group devoted to my all-time favorite author, the Victorian postal worker, Anthony Trollope.  He was Dickens’ contemporary and a good friend of George Eliot, but his work never seemed to get the respect that was given to theirs.  Now I realize that it is 90% of his books have a HEA.  He straddles the line between literature and genre fiction.  One of his books, The Eustace Diamonds, turns up frequently in undergraduate Victorian literature classes, but that is about the extent of the scholarly interest in his work.  Personally, I think he is a master and tons better than Dickens, who used spontaneous combustion in Bleak House to write himself out of a sticky situation.

ACK! Back when I actually thought I could write I took a CW course. The teacher was one of those “feminists” who make REAL feminists look bad. (Kind of like how Fred Phelps makes real Christians look bad, only this dealt with feminist issues.) She LOVED long, pretentious, go no where stories about women with cheating husbands and fishing trips ending up with a guy dying of a heart attack.

I turned in stories involving super heroes, vampires, etc. The class welcomed them. She didn’t seem so sure. LOL

(I did get to her one time really badly. She was bad mouthing Hannibal, which I just read, saying that the book was “proof” that Thomas Harris hated women and blah blah blah. I asked her if she even read it. She admitted she had not. I then proceeded to tear her entire argument to shreds. She was very docile the rest of the semester having been embarrassed in front of her disciples - I mean students.)

@Kilian—After watching The Way We Live Now, I became interested in Anthony Trollope.  You have now sealed the deal.  I’m perusing Trollope titles this very minute.  Thank you!

The Way We Live Now is my favorite novel by my favorite author.  It is his masterpiece IMHO.  I would invite you to join us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) but right now we are taking a trip on his dark side and reading some of his early works set in Ireland in the mid-1800s, full of grinding poverty, drunkenness and no HEA to be found.  We’ll get back to the regular stuff soon, though. It took him a little while to find his voice and his place, but when he did there is no competition.  The CW teacher would have loved this stuff, though, it is so depressing.

Why do people think only depressing, downer stuff can be good writing?  I’ve read depressing crap and excellent genre fiction where everyone is happy.  Good work can be found everywhere.  Must one suffer for it to be Art? Foo on that.

@Kilian - To me, it’s the same way a butt ugly piece of clothing can become “hot” just because some celeb says it is. Someone who everyone looks up to and wants to emulate declares a piece of work “genius” even when it’s a poorly written, depressing POS. *cough*CatcherInTheRye*cough* So everyone, even people who have never and never will read the book declares it genius so they’ll fit in with everyone else. And those, like myself, who dares think for themselves and say otherwise are ostracized and bullied. “How DARE you be different?”

I call it the Sheep Factor.

Someone, at some time, declared only sad endings were literature.  Everyone who wanted to be “hip” and “with it” agreed with them and it stuck. Now, so you look intelligent, you MUST agree with the rest of the sheep. Otherwise you’re “an idiot” and “so low class you just don’t get it.”

But I’ve noticed that most of the people who go around saying how “intelligent” The Great Gasby is never even read it. BAA!!!!

Stupid sheep.

I so respect you guyz!  When I went back to college I was a 32 year old Bartender.  The Eng dept teachers made me feel like
such trash.  Now I realize they were terrified new Phd’s but back then—I NEVER commented on the books chosen.  The one time I mentioned all the bad choices & suffering and terrible endings in the books I got read the riot act and told—if I wouldve had a better background I would understand.  His class and no contrary comments.  I wanted to die. Now I would grind him into dogfood. xxoocf

Earlier this summer, I began reviewing books for (a small) profit. One of my husband’s friends (who had had his English Degree for less than six months and was unemployed) had the brass balls to walk in, look at my stack of romances, and ask “Whose dime store romances?” I could understand (not condone, mind), if they’d been Harlequins and Silhouettes, but these were not monthly installations of a theme. So I gave him the coldest stare I could, and said “Oh, those? I got a job as a book reviewer.” Shut him up, and I’ve never heard a peep out of him about what I’m reading since. And for those of you that want further proof that the romance gods believe in Karma? It’s been a year since he’s graduated and he still has no job.
It still amazes me how attitudes about reading change from grade school to college graduation… In grade school, they’re just happy to see you crack the cover of a book that you’ve chosen to read for your own fun, while by the end of high school or college discussing your choice in reading material becomes its own exercise in social Darwinism. I don’t care what my future kids will read- as long as they enjoy doing so.

“She LOVED long, pretentious, go no where stories about women with cheating husbands and fishing trips ending up with a guy dying of a heart attack.”

Oh, that just cracks me up. If there’s anything I hate, it’s those kinds of stories! At least with genre fiction, you can count on something actually happening!

Well, Austen and EM Forester are great literature and have HEA.  Anya Seton. George Eliot.

Thank you for the interesting thread everyone! Whoever it was that was coughing over Catcher in the Rye, really made my day. Thank you. If Literature is about books passing the test of time, that book really, really didn’t.

Nevertheless, this piece of classic literature is part of the huge and never ending fight I have with my father, who is disappointed that his only reading child is a Fantasy and Romance fan, and doesn’t read “good” books. Which drives me mad.
So when I was a teenager I wasn’t allowed to rent new books from the library before I read Catcher in the Rye. Which I did, and which didn’t help my father’s quest to make me read real Literature at all.

This is how I learned and decided to never judge anything anymore by it’s Literature label, and this is also why the term literary fiction gives me the creeps.

She LOVED long, pretentious, go no where stories about women with cheating husbands and fishing trips ending up with a guy dying of a heart attack.

Heh. That sounds like the sort of thing I read and tried to convince myself I liked when I was in my first couple of years of university. I was the epitome of the pretentious feminist academic, whereas now I am a less-pretentious, only occasionally academic feminist, and less depressed.

I haven’t completely given up on literature/literary fiction either. My favourite book is East of Eden, even if the ending is bittersweet rather than happy (and even though it was on Oprah’s list).

Today is Virginia Woolf’s birthday. Definitely Literature with a capital L.  Here’s what she had to say:

In her long essay about women and literature, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she wrote: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”

She is definitely one Smart Bitch.

This is what I love about this website—a simple HaBO request turns into a spirited discussion on literature vs. popular fiction.

It occurs to me, reading through these posts, that it’s not “literature” per se that’s causing all the agonized tooth-gnashing, but modern literature. What’s happened in the past hundred years or so that, in order for a book to be anointed by the grand pooh-bahs of literary criticism, it must lack a discernible plot? That good, thoughtful writing can’t be page-turning as well? No wonder we keep turning back to the Austens and Trollopes and Eliots and Brontes.

For those looking to smack down modern literary snobs with your good taste, without sacrificing thrilling narrative, I’d suggest the novels of Patrick O’Brian. Every time I give birth, I re-read all twenty of his Aubrey-Maturin novels during breast-pump sessions. (When I get to the end, it’s time to switch to formula.)

I don’t know about the other Lit majors, but when I was in college (early 90’s) we did NOT read Austen, Bronte, or any of those other cool chicks. As a matter of fact, I and about a hundred other souls signed up for what was suppose to be an awesome class about Victorian women writers but surprise surprise they kept the Victorian but changed the class so we had to read some crap I really don’t recall except to say by the end I stopped reading the books and told the teacher to kiss my ass I had enough credits to graduate.
Needless to say at the end (not my HEA) I regretted my major: I thought “Literature” looked better on a resume than “Creative Writing,” but I fit better with the creative writing clan.
Final straw, some old goober told us to write our papers about what he thought the book was about. I didn’t and got an “F.” This credit I did need, so I regurgitated his erroneous ranting and now will be forever stained…dirty…running through moors ranting…tearing my hair out…screaming Catherine (another book they didn’t want us to read, even though we begged for a Gothic Women’s Lit class).
In regards to Lit HEA, I think Kafka’s character was happier as a roach and let’s not forget Faulkner’s Emily (Rose for Emily) got her HEA…and the neighborhood got a new smell. I know, not romantic, just wanted to add to this awesome thread. HABO sounds awesome.

For those looking to smack down modern literary snobs with your good taste, without sacrificing thrilling narrative, I’d suggest the novels of Patrick O’Brian. Every time I give birth, I re-read all twenty of his Aubrey-Maturin novels during breast-pump sessions. (When I get to the end, it’s time to switch to formula.)

I discovered I was a literary snob when I read a review of one of the later O’brian books in The Atlantic Monthly.  I didn’t think Atlantic Monthly would review genre fiction, a historical action/adventure at that.  The reviewer’s assertion was that the series was just one, long novel.  I picked up the first book and have been enjoying it ever since.

Just goes to show, you never know when those snob buttons will get pushed. I try to keep an open mind now.  There are only two kinds of writing - good and bad, and they come in all genres and in Literature, too.

Very interesting thread! As an Edith Wharton aside - if you ever get the chance to visit her home in Lennox Mass. I highly reccomend it! Beautiful place. Amazing gardens, so peaceful.

And the original request in this thread made me think of a couple of novels I read years ago…so I dove into the memory bank and actually came up with the name of the author. Suzanne Frank - Reflections in the Nile and Shawdows on the Aegean. I remember a scene that made me look at honey in a whole new way…

Well, it’s definitely true that one person’s literature is another person’s crap. Like pretty much everyone else here, it seems, I never really cared for Catcher in the Rye, for example, but I had friends who GOT IT. Ditto On the Road. Not for me. I just don’t have an angry teen from the 1950s raring to be free inside me, I guess. On the other hand, I read everything, and I mean Everything, of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I loved it (still do), especially the short stories. And The Great Gatsby is still one of my favorite books (apparently I do have a 1920s outsider yearning to belong inside me).

Some one else commented that there’s just good writing and bad writing. Too true. My fear, though, is that romance readers feel so looked down upon by the mainstream (and I get, we pretty much are assumed to be moron, lonely, spinster cat ladies, regardless of our actual demographics) that there’s an impulse to circle the wagons and defend the genre anytime anyone makes a general criticism. Once you’re an autonomous adult, no one should read what they don’t want to read, or write what they don’t want to write. But—do we have to go to “literature is depressing, romance is happy, they hate me for my HEA and I hate them for their dead babies and broken dreams?” Or trash the whole establishment because we didn’t like particular books in it (after all, isn’t that what we hate when other people do it to romance—trash the genre because they read a few books that didn’t work for them?).

Read what you want to read. Don’t read what you don’t want to read. Love whatever books you want and hate whatever books you want. But reading and loving romance doesn’t have to be because you had a bad experience with Henry James, or J. D. Salinger. No justification is necessary to like what you like.

Sorry for the rant—I’m not even sure exactly what I’m ranting at anymore, but I’ll post this anyway.

Teehee. It tickles me when I see someone else who doesn’t like Catcher.

I read it in jr. high while on a family vacation. Mom handed it to me and said, “Your brothers had to read this in high school so you might as well too.” I hated it. Fast forward to high school, we were reading it and I STILL thought it was the dumbest POS ever written. I asked the teacher why we had to read it and she replied, “Because ALL teenagers can identify with Holden.”

I said, “I don’t.”

Her reply, “Don’t be stupid, of course you do!”

Now as for The Great Gatsby, I feel that was more poor teaching on the teacher’s part. He was more concerned with finding himself a wife then teaching his students. He used to come in and whine about his lousy dates.

(Sad story with him. He eventually did meet a woman who was divorced with one daughter. They were married and deeply in love. Within one year of getting married he had a huge stroke. I understand he now has the mentality of a 9 year old or younger and will have to live the rest of his life in a home. It just devastated both the wife and daughter, I hear, because they both loved him so much. Apparently he was a wonderful father, more so then the daughter’s biological dad.)

I’m late commenting on the Buccaneers thread of this discussion, but has anyone seen the Masterpiece Theater version? It’s amazing—several hours of beautiful costumes and sets, and the book really comes alive.

This has been hilarious/wonderful/rotten and so full of great story ideas!  ANy wannabe writer could just use this thread for live eva and get—maybe—six books outa it.  Love youse girlz. xxoocf

“She LOVED long, pretentious, go nowhere stories about women with cheating husbands and fishing trips ending with a guy dying of a heart attack”.  I suppose it’s too much to ask for the guy with the heart attack to have been the woman’s cheating husband.  That would, after all, be a HEA - for her.  Also, you wouldn’t want to suggest the possibility of divine retribution.  I don’t know if other people are having a problem or if its just my computer, but big chunks of the original synopsis are either unreadable or missing.  This has been happening on this site for a while now.  Spamword quality 58; well, I suppose I can read about 58%.

@Sandra - sorry, two different stories by two different people. The guy with the heart attack was written by a guy writing about a bunch of men on a fishing trip in Alaska. And the entire story was all leading up to just that heart attack. It’s like “Boring, long winded description, mundane things no one cares about - BOOM! HEART ATTACK!”

Cheating husband was written by a woman who was writing about a wife and husband visiting his native land of France. (She was American.) Of course he cheated with her best friend. She cried and stayed with him. *facepalm*

I have that problem - I find if I highlight it, the text magically appears. Until then it’s like it’s squished.

On a side note, at the time and for awhile after I was writing short fetish stories involving BDSM where the women were always the one tied up. (Sadly, you can probably still find my efforts out there if you googled my full name with safe search off. Ug. Good thing I’m not famous, huh?) I wonder how my “All women are good, all men should be locked in cages and only be left alive for breeding purposes” teacher would’ve reacted to those stories instead of my superhero ones.

I’m a bad girl, aren’t I?

@Beatriz

It occurs to me, reading through these posts, that it’s not “literature” per se that’s causing all the agonized tooth-gnashing, but modern literature. What’s happened in the past hundred years or so that, in order for a book to be anointed by the grand pooh-bahs of literary criticism, it must lack a discernible plot? That good, thoughtful writing can’t be page-turning as well? No wonder we keep turning back to the Austens and Trollopes and Eliots and Brontes.

Perhaps the names we have mentioned didn’t know they were writing “Literature” at the time.  They just wanted to tell a good story any way they could.  It seems now that some contemporary authors are so self-conscious and worried that their stuff might be taken for

genre fiction, that they deliberately take anything resembling a plot or character development

<"cough"Cormac McCarthy"cough">

out of the book.  People will be reading and rereading Larry McMurtry and Elmore Leonard long after other authors are forgotten.  100 years from now, they will be Literature.

It occurs to me, reading through these posts, that it’s not “literature” per se that’s causing all the agonized tooth-gnashing, but modern literature. What’s happened in the past hundred years or so that, in order for a book to be anointed by the grand pooh-bahs of literary criticism, it must lack a discernible plot? That good, thoughtful writing can’t be page-turning as well?

There’s a reason I structured my entire undergraduate experience so as to avoid taking any 20th literature classes other than the single one required to graduate.  Part of that reason is my fervant hatred for the beat poets in general and “On the Road” in particular, but most of it is that every classic of 20th century literature I read in high school was grindingly depressing—you know it’s bad when Hemmingway is the bright, cheerful spot in your curriculum.  But at least Faulkner, Steinbeck, et al.‘s writing has scope and characterization and plot.  It’s just not characterization or plot that I *like*.  A lot of post-modern stuff…

My personal opinion is that when people are selecting the Great Novels of the 20th Century in a hundred years or so, Tolkien’s LotR will have a bigger spot on the list than any capital-L-Literary novels from the past twnty-thirty years.  Considerations of quality or taste aside, it’s certainly been more influential.

I think some authors forget that humans seem to be hard-wired for narrative at their own peril.

Actually, I just finished reading an Edith Wharton book that does have a HEA. It was out of print for a long time and I just heard about it. The Glimpses of the Moon is about Nick and Susy, two poor upper-class types who make a bargain get married and live as long as they can off the generosity of their “set”  - borrowed villas, fat wedding checks and the like - always with the understanding that should a better chance come along for each of them, that person is free to take it. They figure that they’ll do better as a couple than they would individually. And they do…until those other opportunities come along.

Speaking of Catcher in the Rye…both of my kids had to read it in high school and both thought the main character, Holden, was whiny and self-centered. (The way many, but thankfully not all, teens can be.) My daughter’s English class essay on the book was titled, “Why Holden Caulfield Should Be Dipped Groin First—That’s Right, Groin First—Into A Vat of Boiling Oil.”

She got an A+.

@Lori - Your daughter is awesome and makes me wish I had kids.

The fact the teacher gave her an A+ rather then the F I would’ve gotten from my teacher says that the teacher is awesome too. They deserve a great end of the year gift.

Elspeth, I did the same thing in picking my literature courses!  I did everything I could to avoid Hemingway, modernism, and most 20th century literature.  I wasn’t entirely successful—I had to take a class in British modernism and ohmygod I could have cheerfully slit my wrists.

One of my favorite classes was heroic epics: my prof made Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings the focus of the course.  So we actually got to read great novels and examine the works that influenced Tolkien.  It was one of the only lit classes I ever took that was at max capacity.

@Lori - sorry for bugging you, but you know, I would LOVE to read your daughter’s essay. Any chance of posting it online so we can all enjoy her genius?

@JamiSings,
Lol, I don’t know if the entire essay was as good as the title!  But this was several years ago and she no longer lives at home. If we have a copy, even a digital one, I wouldn’t know where to look for it. (The title is something I’ll never forget, though!) But thanks for asking! :-)

Yikes! Talk about karma. J.D. Salinger just .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). *hangs head*

RIP.