Bookmarked
Reading My Way from Hollywood to Brooklyn
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Wendy Fairey grew up among books. As the shy and studious daughter of famed Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lover during the last years of his life—she began as a child reading her way through the library Fitzgerald had assembled for her mother and escaped into the landscape of classic English novels. Their protagonists became her intimates, starting with David Copperfield, whose sensibility and aspirations seemed so akin to her own. She felt as plain as Jane Eyre but craved the panache of Becky Sharp. English novels squired her to adulthood, and Bookmarked is a memoir of that journey.
In a series of brilliant chapters that blend the genres of personal memoir and literary criticism, we follow Fairey, refracted through her reading, as student, wife, professor, mother, grandmother, and happily remarried writer. E. M. Forster’s Howards End helps her cope with a failing marriage; Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay teaches important lessons about love and memory. Like Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, she learns only as an adult of her Jewish heritage (and learns also the identity of her real father, the British philosopher A. J. Ayer). In this intimate and inspiring book, Wendy Fairey shows that her love of reading has been both a source of deep personal pleasure and key to living a fulfilling and richly self-examined life.
Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For context, it matters that Fairey's mother was famous Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham, the final lover of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who mentored her reading and who died in her house. As Fairey explains in this literary bildungsroman, her life as a reader began with the classic novels which Fitzgerald bought her mother and which she grew up with on the family's bookshelves. Fairey has told the story before (One of the Family), but here she achieves a satisfying intertwining of Graham's life with her own: the personal (boarding school, graduate school, marriage) and professional (as college administrator and teacher.) She matches each stage of her life to a different literary character, mostly from 19th century and early 20th century British novels, including David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Portrait of a Lady, Howards End, To the Lighthouse, and A Passage to India. As the book closes, she finds herself on a "steep learning curve," discovering a new world of Indian writers in preparation for a trip to that country. Bookish folk will relish her conviction that literature speaks directly to personal experience; readers who share her special interests will find themselves engaged, even in disagreement, with her critical analyses. Memoirs of Hollywood, and of children's recollections of the famous, abound, but this very bookish one, uniquely, is rereadable.