Beauty Before Comfort
A Memoir (Text Only)
-
- 75,00 kr
-
- 75,00 kr
Publisher Description
A beautiful and touching memoir of Allison Glock’s grandmother, this is both an extraordinary portrait of a truly remarkable woman and a engaging history of 20th century Appalachia.
'"Beauty before comfort," she would say as she trimmed her brows and cinched her belts corset-tight. My grandmother is so beautiful she has never once been comfortable, a cross she bears with the subtlety of Liberace.'
So writes Allison Glock at the start of her remarkable memoir, the story of her maternal grandmother, Aneita Jean Blair, and the extraordinary life she led growing up in Chester, West Virginia, a sooty factory town wedged between the unforgiving Appalachians and the Ohio River. As a girl, a young woman, and even late in life as a grandmother, Aneita Jean had a magnetism that attracted and enchanted all she came into contact with. Allison Glock takes us through the stages of her life, capturing not only the irrepressible vitality of a woman born ahead of her time, but also the eccentricities of a small-town, working-class West Virginia family, trying to survive the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Aneita, blessed with 'the body of Miss America' was determined that she would escape the town that was holding her back. That she never made it, and the pattern that her life ended up taking, is just another small-town tragedy of the vanished dreams of one extraordinary person. Allison Glock writes with humour, lyricism and beauty to create a truly unforgettable portrait of a remarkable person.
Reviews
‘Delicious. “Beauty Before Comfort” is as apt a title as you could find for a memoir that is tart and poetic. Allison Glock has the kind of writing talent that packs worlds into sentences. It takes in all of American small town life and all of the American Dream. With a few deft strokes Ms Glock summons up some wonderful characters from her family history, all circling around the grandmother, Aneita Jean Blair. You won’t forget this woman and you’ll remember forever the writer’s magical skills.’ Frank McCourt
‘This is a funny, tender, searing and uniquely honest take on one woman’s life. It’s also a portrait of a generation. Not to mention a meditation on our stories, how they echo, and what those echoes mean.’ Colum McCann
‘Allison Glock makes it look easy. Her memoir of her sexy, spirited grandmother is perfectly told and perfectly written. I can’t remember the last time I met a woman in print who became as real to me as young Aneita Jean Blair – a girl so heartbreaking, so wild, so vividly rendered into flesh that you can almost feel yourself inside her body. An unforgettable portrait.’ Elizabeth Gilbert
About the author
allison glock, a writer-at-large for GQ and mother of two girls, lives in northern New Jersey. This is her first book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In West Virginia hillbilly country during the 1930s and '40s, Aneita Jean Blair was a "slinky redhead with a knowing smile" and a Miss America figure. She was shamelessly provocative, relentlessly freeloving and determined to get the hell out of depressed Hancock County. She also had a stinging wit and a storehouse of aphorisms ("beauty before comfort" was one). Although her life turned out to be far narrower than her aspirations, Aneita Jean was lucky in having a granddaughter, the author of this memoir, who has conveyed her flamboyant personality and memorialized the strings of beaux she ran through, the chic clothes she wore and the tragedies she surmounted. While the narrative initially grabs the reader with bold and brassy anecdotes, when Glock segues into the history of the Blair family, the tension declines. The story is sometimes poignant, sometimes predictable and sometimes far-fetched. While some of her reconstructed family tales run thin, Glock does not honey coat her grandmother's character. Not every granddaughter would write, "she had given in entirely to her shallowest instincts and run whole hog into the bliss of debauchery." As a social history the memoir fascinates. Because of the clay on the shores of the Ohio River, pottery factories were established there in the 1850s, and they became the family trade. Descriptions of factory jobs, the brutal working conditions and the chronic diseases they caused (including rampant alcoholism) are valuable indices of our national history. The account's candor and Glock's gift for juicy metaphors ("Puberty hit my grandmother like a dropped piano") add memorable touches to an offbeat story. 20 photos.