Giuro ero convinta che fosse chicklit, non ricordo nemmeno quanto tempo fa l'ho scaricato in ebook, poi sabato sera trovo un riferimento a questo libro nel memoir della Ernaux, in cui tra l'altro si dice che l'autrice si è poi suicidata a 26 anni. Mi ci sono buttata a capofitto.
E' un romanzo lineare, che ti tiene incollata alla storia, disarmante che mi ha fatta soffrire parecchio. Mi chiedo come mai passi così inosservato, pur se scritto a metà degli anni '50 è assolutamente contemporaneo e universale. Onestamente, avrei preferito leggere questo al posto dei 100 colpi di spazzola, racconta bene il diventare donna ed è più delicato e profondo. ( )

Wow, this reprint of a 1956 bestseller is dynamite! I’ll just tell you what happens in the first chapter: Fifteen year old Courtney (this novel is what led to Courtney becoming a popular girl’s name, just as Charlotte Bronte gave us Shirley as a girl’s name, both names originally being for boys) lounges around with her naked roommate Janet and tells her about how her parents each thought the other was taking her for vacation so she got stuck at boarding school. Janet warns Courtney that she’s gone overboard in her crush for a female teacher and that she’ll end up queer. Courney goes to meet with this teacher, Miss Rosen. They talk a little about Finnegan’s Wake and Courtney tells her that she doesn’t think of herself as a woman and ever since she can remember she’s been male in her dreams. Then Miss Rosen tells her she doesn’t want to spend time alone with Courtney anymore because Courtney should make friends with her peers, and Courtney is devestated.

The novel follows Courtney for about two years from boarding school to Hollywood to NYC’s Upper East Side. I think I enjoyed this novel more as an adult than I would have as a teenager, because when I was a kid I got frustrated by stories where people were supposed to be “sophisticated” and that meant being exploited, abused, depressed, and constantly drunk. Parts of Chocolates for Breakfast seem very authentic and true to life, and other parts seem like a naive young person’s idea of what ought to be in a shocking novel. But since I was not alive during the 1950’s I could have the two completely backwards.

The story of the author Pamela Moore, who was eighteen when this novel was originally published and dead by suicide at 26, is as interesting as the novel. I get the impression that being a teenaged internationally-bestselling writer isn’t as sensational an experience as you’d think. She wrote several more novels, but they didn’t do well. When she died, she left behind a husband and baby son. At the end of the book there are some interesting essays on Pamela Moore, including one by her son. There are also some manuscript pages of material that was cut from the book either by Moore herself, her editor, or her agent, mostly homoerotic passages about Miss Rosen and stuff about suicide.

I love seeing a forgotten classic back in print and ready to be enjoyed by a new generation, especially a forgotten classic by a woman writer. I really wish I could discuss this book with my mom, who was born just one year earlier than Pamela Moore and most likely read this book. But the world is not a wish-granting factory &c.

The part where I complain querulously about trivial matters: I feel a reprint should not have so many typos. Also, what’s going on with the cover, which seems to be a stock photo of a contemporary girl in contemporary clothes? The cover does not say 1950s or, well, anything, to me.

Theme song: Gloomy Sunday by Billie Holiday
Other book like this one: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, just a little bit.

Trigger warning for: neglectful parents, M/C being molested by various men (“having an affair”), dating violence, frequent use of homophobic slurs, bisexual character who hates himself for not being a real man, cutting, being in the bin (“sanitarium”), casual mention of date rape, abusive parents, mentally ill parents, and suicide.
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Posh. Pretending ( )

Better than it has any right to be coming of age story set in New York and Hollywood, about a young girl dizzy from money, drinking and all kinds of attention from men and women alike. I thought it would be a throwaway read but I ended up finding it moving and (bitter)sweet and would recommend it as a step up from Perks of Being a Wallflower and the like. ( )

Courtney Farrell is a 15-year-old boarding school student with divorced bicoastal parents. She has little interaction with her parents (they actually forget about her over spring break, leaving her alone at school for a couple of days), so her only advice comes from Janet, her roommate and best friend; well, her only friend. After a breakdown Courtney leaves school and moves to Hollywood with her actress mother. Proximity doesn’t provide any more parental influence, however. She is basically left to her own devices, spending her afternoons at the pool and her evenings in the company of various actors, learning to smoke, drink and losing her virginity to a bisexual actor at least 10 years her senior. When summer ends she does enroll in school, but makes no friends. A year goes by and then her mother’s career takes them both back to New York – where her father lives – but things don’t change much. Except that she reconnects with Janet, and the two of them (now 17 or 18) spend their evenings going to bars and cocktail parties with a group of wealthy college dropouts, presumably waiting for their lives to begin.

Pamela Moore was only eighteen when this debut novel was first published in 1956. It was a sensation and an international best seller. But it’s clear to me that it was written by an 18-year-old. There is talent here, but it’s raw. One quote pretty much sums up the philosophy of Courtney and Janet:
Centering her life around men rather than around her mother was more secure: men were at least replaceable if they failed.
Interesting that she doesn’t draw any comparison between “men” and her “father.”

Courtney is also caught up in a romantic fantasy of living a charmed life. At one point her father says that she is like her mother – If she were drowning, she would wave off the rescuers in a last gesture of defiance, because they were fishermen in a rowboat and she wanted to be saved by a yacht. - He then orders his teen daughter another Martini!

When first published it was considered scandalous for the references to homosexuality, divorce and suicide. Apparently all the drinking, smoking and teenager/older man sex didn’t seem unusual.

Major book reviews have called it “Permeated with sadness and existential longing” (Los Angeles Review of Books), or “A gem of adolescent disaffection featuring a Holden Caulfield-like heroine (Vogue). In a sense I agree with these assessments, but I didn’t find it sensational, moving, or terribly interesting. I just found it sad, in the way that I feel sad when reading about any young person who is so very lost.

I understand that Courtney is displaying signs of depression; I get that her distant parents provide little structure to help stabilize her; I recognize that her exclusive friendship with Janet is a recipe for disaster. I did like that Courtney is a loyal friend, and tries her best to make a way for herself. But I never cared about her or any of the other characters. It’s a pretty fast read, though I had a hard time getting into it. And an even harder time watching the inevitable spiral to disaster.
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