Glory Goes and Gets Some

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 27 mar 2003

From her patrician childhood on New York?s Upper East Side, to her chemical addictions downtown, and her unlikely, tenuous yet rewarding alliances on 12-step rehab programs in the Midwest, Glory gives us an uncensored and irreverent account of her experiences scoring dope on the streets and seeking redemption in recovery. The straight road has never had so many turns as Glory hooks up with other casualties from the chemical generation. There?s ex-Sister Jacqueline who fled the convent of the Sisters of Patience with the baby Jesus under her arm, ever relapsing gun freak Dooley who wants to be sober but is always drunk and Zemecki, so immersed in his lonely torpor that he can only express love for his ex-girlfriend?s cat. In this streetwise and sardonic book, Glory finds love and work whilst steering clear of self-pity and ?happy-talk?: she very determinedly goes and gets some. Winner of the prestigious Whiting Award for young writers, Emily Carter is that rare combination: a writer who can do very dark lightly.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781852428242
ISBN-10: 1852428244
Pagini: 240
Dimensiuni: 129 x 197 x 16 mm
Ediția:Main
Editura: Profile
Colecția Serpent's Tail
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom

Notă biografică

Emily Carter grew up in New York and now lives in Minnesota. In 2001 she won the prestigious Whiting Award for new writers. She is the daughter of writer Anne Roiphe and sister of Katie Roiphe author of The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus

Recenzii

?If you were in rehab, you would want Gloria Bronski, the ex-drug addict heroine of Carter?s collection in your therapy sessions. Carter?s narrator relates even her lowest moments with lucidity and comic panache? New York Times ?Emily Carter has a completely original voice. It is sassy and tragic simultaneously. And it is true? Erica Jong ?Emily Carter is a young writer of staggering intelligence and compassion, whose deep insights turn not on the self -conscious, but on life?s more challenging struggles: lovelessness, regret, self-understanding, and self-worth, to name a few? Boston Review ?Carter?s account of alienation and tentative recovery is a marvel of humor and self-awareness, remarkably devoid of self-pity? Newsday

Extras

Glory Goes and Gets Some by Emily CarterLeadtext: All right, maybe I do. Maybe I do talk first and think later. Yes, it's true, I admit it freely. It's because I'm from the city. Now, you can say to me, Glory B., it's no crime to think about what you're going to say before you say it, to figure out how it relates to the topic being discussed, or if it does at all, or if what you're going to say has the slightest factual basis whatsoever. I've got that argument down cold, because listen, words are my music. When I talk, I improvise. It's not so much what I'm saying as how it sounds. Take jazz, all right, let's use jazz as an analogy, parallels are always good. Now, what I mean is, what do you think every time Bird sat down to blow he had the whole musical score right in front of him? Did he have the whole thing thought out? He did not. Well, he probably did not, I'm not entirely familiar with the man's work, but probably, most likely he improvised is what I'm saying.Now some people, people from Someplace, say, like Minnesota, they think about what they're going to say before they say it. They're not attuned to the sound of words, because they probably grew up sitting on their porches after dinner and homework, listening to crickets, which just make one sound, over and over again, and put you in a trance so you can just sit there not moving and think, think, think, until you go inside and watch television or make fruit jellies. That's where all those types with the masters in philosophy come from: Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, like that. Brooding and musing all the time. Very, very Swedish, if you catch my drift. Trust them, why should I?Never go to the movies with someone from Minnesota. Here's what I mean:I have this friend, we used to go out in high school, about six hundred years ago, but he went to college and grad school while I kept forgetting to get up in the morning, and now he's my friend and he lives in Inwood, which is way far north, where the subway stations have elevators in them to get you back up to street level because you're so far underground, and when you come up you're on top of a hill and all around you is miles and miles of nothing that looks like the city you grew up in, wide boulevards with vague glittering lights from fastfood restaurants and body shops. So you see what I mean--my friend has chosen an untrendy existence in an unfashionable part of town. So when he calls me up to tell me he has fallen in love with this amazing girl who's not only beautiful, but also brilliant, where does she come from? Well, a hint, it's a lot farther west than Fort Lee, New Jersey, and there's plenty of wheat out there. And what's she doing here? Getting her degree in Kierkegaard, another Nordic good-time boy. He tells me her name is Lara Kjellaan and he wants me to meet her, for some reason he thinks it's very important that we meet. So all right, they'll come down from the north pole and we'll go to the movies.When I meet them outside the theater and we all shake hands I'm thinking that I probably really am an alcoholic because one of the questions they ask you is "when you're in social situations where alcohol is not present, do you feel uncomfortable?" Answer: Yes, absolutely. Let's face it, the only thing I like to do is sit around a bar and drink alcoholic beverages. This meeting people I don't know, this going to the movies, it's not for me, really it's not. But I shake this Lara person's hand and smile warmly at her, a smile that communicates nothing so much as the fact that I have no plans to try to sleep with her boyfriend, because if we don't start from there, forget it, I won't be able to hack this evening at all, and I'm already wishing that I could just spend my whole life talking to strangers who love the sound of my voice, buy me shots of the local spirits, some kind of potent potato liquor brewed in the mountains by peasant women who mix it all up with their saliva. What's so bad about people's saliva? I think we should all share each other's saliva, why not? Saliva, of course, is something I'm thinking a lot about when I meet my old friend and his new girl, because she's very small, has sparrow-boned shoulders and ivory fingers delicate as a tree frog's knobbly feet. Her hair is the color of straw and her face is washed with a faint dusting of freckles. The whole deal makes me nervous, and when I'm nervous I tend to spit when I talk. Not much, just a little, a little mist.When I calm down enough to hear what's going on around me I hear my friend reeling off a list of Lara's academic credits--University X, Foundation grant Y--because he thinks given half a chance I will dismiss this sweetie as a generic love interest, which really isn't giving me any credit at all. We're all standing in this long line and just as he gets to the part about applying to some writer's colony the line starts to move. I hover over Lara, ready to confide, this must be awkward for her, too? She's hardly had the chance to say one single word, what with her boyfriend doing her advance PR work. I remember in high school we almost never got around, me and this guy, to making out, because he talked so much, and half the time we'd end up in an argument about who was the biggest hypocrite and not speak to each other for a week. We broke up by midterms, if I remember correctly.So I'm hovering over this Lara, and like always with really small women, I feel like Alice after she took the one pill that makes you larger, big and--here's the word--galumphing. Galumphing, good word, and that of course makes me feel this heady sensation of protectiveness toward the smaller woman, and then the usual realization dawns on me. Oh My God I Am A Lesbian. And not one of those hip stylish ones who write avant-garde movie scripts and get their pictures taken in nightclubs either. I'm some sad old thing sitting at the bar while my little femme fatale girlfriend cheats on me with anything, male or female, that happens to be around. In other words, I get treated the way I've treated certain men in my life, which as a thought is worse than thinking about car accidents. So I say to Lara, would she like some popcorn, my treat. She's so short I want to put my hand on her shoulder, but I don't. I put it instead into my pocket to dig out the money. My friend comes out of the men's room and we go inside the theater. Then there's the thing about who sits where, which I can't stand either; it's more of that kind of thing that makes me pull at my hair when I'm sober. We could sit with my friend between us, but I don't like the looks of that--like he's got two girls, one on either side, nudge, nudge, lucky dog, heh-heh. But then again if I sit on the outside of Lara, it will look like I'm some sort of third wheel, some kind of duenna, or some horrible thing like that. I'm standing in the aisle, thinking about what it would be like to be someplace else, sitting in my kitchen for instance, or watching my insane and sorrowful upstairs neighbour Katasha write down lists of her enemies, when here comes the thought, to my rescue, like Superman. Just sit, Gloria, it doesn't matter where, because No One Is Looking At You. Hard to believe, and yet it's an ontological starting point I must adhere to, at times, even just to get out of my apartment.Anyway, I forget about all that noise as soon as the movie starts. Let me tell you about this movie. It was amazing, and it made me cry at the end, not the kind of crying where they trick you into it with violet colored lights and a certain kind of music that attaches itself directly to your tear ducts and pulls at them like an invisible, milking jellyfish, so you feel a little ashamed of yourself for being so easily run through the maze to get your money's worth; but the kind of crying where you've just gotten a sense of the fact that there is life, and people go through it, and they die, some of them kill each other, but a man who knew nothing, not even how to talk to people, was somehow able to learn to make things grow out of the earth. Something like that.The movie put me in a wrestling hold of excitement. Whenever I see something like that every single tendon in my arms and legs seems to buzz a little, and I feel like twitching and jumping. What this is, really, is the desire to do something like that, make that picture, paint that painting, walk that walk, talk that talk. I want to do something like that, something good. What I do when I feel like that, usually, is kill that energy as soon as possible. I go have a drink, or I eat an entire Philadelphia cheesecake, which will make it impossible to think about anything but my intestines for the next three hours. But now I've got to go for coffee, coffee of all things, and I'm walking fast, turning around every now and then to the couple behind me, saying, "Incredible. It was incredible. Fuck." My friend agrees with me. "Incredible," he echoes, but when we get to the coffee shop it turns out he's got reservations, he thinks the filmmaker could have gone further with the atrocities depicted in the war scene."What," I say, "the depicted atrocities weren't enough for you? You can't stand it when anyone does anything well, is what your problem is.""I'm not saying he didn't make a good movie," my friend says, "I'm just saying that when push came to shove, he sold out." When my friend says "sold out" he bangs his fist down on the table and the coffee sloshes over his cup, running thinly over the formica and down the ridged metal edge of the table, dropping off in little beads. He doesn't notice. Lara sops it up with a napkin. Meanwhile I'm saying, "Yeah, sold out? Sold out to who? Is this man going to become rich off this film? No, I think not. Who did he sell out to then? Who?" I raise my hands in question and knock over a bowl of sugar. I make a plow out of my hand and wipe the sugar to the floor. There are principles here, and I mean every word I'm saying. We keep going. The waitress asks us to lower our voices. Cigarette butts pile up in the ashtray. I compare the narrowness of his righteous unbending rigid thinking to that of Mussolini. He compares all my old boyfriends to Hitler. I draw an analogy between the alchemy of the movie and something about Madame Curie. Which brings up radiation, which brings up Hiroshima, and the ashtray clatters to the floor spilling gray dust and cigarettes everywhere. We work quickly to get it all up before the waitress sees it, and we continue through the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, various pop stars compared to the blues singers they ripped off their music from. And finally, finally my rudeness dawns on me like a wet gray November morning. I pull in my gesturing hands which are leaping about like struggling swordfish on a tight line. I narrow the big opening my mouth makes in my face and look at Lara who has been sitting quietly through the whole discussion, looking pleasantly first at one of us, then at the other."Well," I say, "what about you, what do you think?" Lara takes a moment to answer. She takes so many seconds to answer that I am about to throw another question at her, because I just can't wait, I'm jumping out of my seat; but before I can, Lara says, "Well." She says, "well," and slowly, slowly, clears her throat."The thing about the scene you were talking about," she says and gives a little apologetic smile, "is it was about the First World War, not the Second." The First World War. Not the Second. It's like hitting a wall of air. If this movie is about the First World War and not the Second, everything we've been saying is either completely beside the point, or ludicrously wrong. For a moment there is actually no sound at all at our table."Did you know that the whole time?" I ask."Well," she says, "yes, pretty much.""Why didn't you stop us?"She looks absolutely frank and undisturbed as she says, "What you were saying was interesting."I just sit there, my arguments and brilliant parallels drifting down around me like invisible balloons with the air let out. Those people from the Midwest. Oh, they're clever. Watch the snowflakes fall, observe the sky change from blue to black to blue again, and think and think and think before they speak.You can't trust them, you just can't. But what if she hadn't been there, what if we had gone on all night calling something that was obviously blue red--eighteen different shades of red."Listen," I say to my friend, "I'm not kidding, marry this woman."

Descriere

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Carter's stories link and overlap to form a book-length narrative about the trials and tribulations of Glory, now in her thirties and HIV-positive. Once the adored little girl of professionals, she became a rowdy drunk, and then an opiate abuser living in a down-and-out Minneapolis neighborhood.

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