Sixty going on 12

>> Lesley Dormen taps into girlish nostalgia in her Greenwich Village story The Best Place to Be

The Best Place to Be opens with quintessential New Yorker, Grace Hanford, looking back to “the summer we were 50 and the little Cuban boy went home to no mother, not the first West Nile virus summer but the second, the Hillary and Survivor summer, you know that summer...” Yeah I kind of know that summer, but I wasn’t close to 50 and neither was the friend who has been pestering me for the last six months to keep an eye out for Lesley Dormen’s debut “novel in short stories.”

My friend read the first story in The Atlantic Monthly some months back and was struck by the same quote that hit me like cupid with a stealth arrow. Grace has finally found true love after a life of miscarried relationships unfolding mostly in Greenwich Village. About a decade ago, she met and married Richard. “Not neurotic or tricky, not the least bit mean.” And now she can look back and say: “That was me, married to the one man who made me feel like my fiercest, most clear-hearted 12-year-old self and not any of the men who made me feel that other way, that euphorically grandiose, desperately insecure, wildly libidinous twenty-five-year-old way.”

A hundred years in the history of psychoanalysis pondering the complicated desires of women, wasted, because there it is: happiness, as clear and simple as a recipe for brownies. This is why Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women is still in trade paperback 36 years after the first edition. And this is the reason why Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals is likely to find a home on the Canadian bestseller list well beyond the nudge from winning Canada Reads. Women have an unquenchable nostalgia for that period in their lives just on the edge of that slippery slope before hormones and culture set in, that time when they were the people they were just before they became women.

Imagine Del Jordan, Munro’s iconic pre-pubescent heroine, all grown up and living in Manhattan, or O’Neill’s Baby living life not on the streets, but in the various homes of a glamorous, fun, but soulless Jackie O clone mother who trades in husbands like cars. This is Grace Hanford, a woman entering her 60s having recently rediscovered the clear-eyed intuition of a smart child.

There are of course significant differences between these three writers. Dormen is as cosmopolitan as Munro is small-town, as establishment smart as O’Neill is street smart. Munro has an amazing genius for taking the deceptively dull, small town and making it complex and fascinating. Dormen’s accomplishment is closer to O’Neill’s, taking a chaotic, complicated city and reducing it to its basic alchemy. O’Neill and Munro, however, mine emotional trauma with the courage and persistence of, well, miners. Dormen’s story circles around a pinhole of trauma so dark that the best Grace can do is desperately dance around it for the rest of her life. It would wreck the book to reveal too much about this incident, so I won’t. But essays are waiting to be written about how Dormen deals with the dark side of 12, compared to, let’s say, O’Neill, or Nabokov.

Best of all, however, Dormen is just fun to read. Even before my favourite quote, she had me hooked when she blithely eviscerated the Cinderella myth, like a master chef paring a chicken. “We ate dinner there, in front of the TV. It was summer so there was nothing on. We were watching a biography of the actress Jane Seymour, Dr. Quinn, with the hair. How her first husband left her and her life was terrible, then she had a baby, then her life was terrible again, then she had another baby. Like that. Terrible, baby, terrible, baby, commercial, baby, baby, with some husbands thrown in and a castle and the hair.”

THE BEST PLACE TO BE BY LESLEY DORMEN,
SIMON & SCHUSTER, HC, 176PP, $26.99