MacDougal Street Ghosts
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the critically acclaimed memoir South Mountain Road comes a powerful story of one woman's emotional, intellectual, and sexual awakening.
Following her success as an Academy Award-nominated screenplay writer (Children of a Lesser God) and highly praised memoirist, Hesper Anderson pens an evocative novel that reinforces her reputation as a compelling storyteller.
Long divorced and her children grown, Callie Epstein is packing her house to move to Northern California. Uncovering a box of long-forgotten home movies, she sits back to watch her family's life unfold again before her eyes, reliving the best -- and the worst -- years of her life.
In the center of Greenwich Village is an enclave of green called the MacDougal Gardens. A block long, it can only be reached by the sixteen houses that border it. Or, as some say, by the ghosts who once lived here and enjoy coming back to visit. It's the late sixties, and women like Callie are discovering The Feminine Mystique and The Sexual Response of the Human Female. Feeling trapped in a passionless marriage, Callie begins an affair with a neighbor that leads to a desired, but wrenching, separation from her husband. She soon finds herself struggling to support three children and grappling with her turbulent emotions. In an act of desperation, she accepts an invitation from her lover's unsuspecting wife to stay with them at the beach, hoping to win more than his affection with her presence. At the end of a summer filled with secrets, Callie faces a shocking revelation as the quiet community within the MacDougal Street Gardens implodes.
Unable to remain in New York, emotionally or financially, Callie moves her family across the country to Los Angeles. Thus begins a journey of self-discovery and a search for real independence.
In Callie, Hesper Anderson has created an unforgettable heroine who will resonate deeply with all women.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The collateral damage from a long-ago love affair resurfaces when Callie Hyde Epstein, now a successful, middle-aged Los Angeles screenwriter, stumbles on a forgotten cache of home movies, circa 1968, in this honest debut novel from screenwriter (Children of a Lesser God) and memoirist (South Mountain Road) Anderson. The films document her age of innocence (and its inevitable corruption) when as a young housewife she lived with her steady-if-repressed husband, Irwin, and their three children in one of the 16 Greenwich Village townhouses that border MacDougal Gardens. In all seasons, the children play in the private enclave surrounded by the houses, while their parents gather there to flirt with the counterculture and one another's spouses. Callie yields to temptation and frustration, and has an affair with her neighbor, Sam Messenger. Emboldened by her sexual awakening, she unloads her shocked husband, and in short order the fallout from her newfound freedom teaches her some hard truths. This unsentimental novel is a thoughtful re-examination of a fraught era, but it lacks emotional immediacy and suffers from being told in flashback. Its lack of suspense leaves only the painful witnessing of Callie's blunders as she moves blindly through selfishness to selfhood.