This book was a nice surprise.
I was expecting more chick-lit and less clever introspection and witty social commentary. I would call Ms. Gilman a better-grounded David Sedaris. Just as funny as he, but not quite as bitter.
“Hypocrite In A White Dress” chronicles Susie’s life from kindergarten until her first year of marriage. Each chapter in her life is an essay that could stand on its own two legs. The book is chronological but reads more as a series of wonderful personal essays.
Susie Gilman is a very prescient writer.She captures the crazy feelings of childhood, the joys and dramas of middle school and the wild high school years. She continues to her college years and first jobs, then to her relationships with men, and eventual marriage in a giant white dress. The title perfectly captures her sensibilities.
With so much information, it could become overly sesquipedalian (much like myself), but she stay quick and it moves right along
The book’s subtitle is “Tales of growing up groovy and clueless.” Groovy maybe but not clueless. Gilman is not only very astute in her observations, she is wildly amusing. A manifesto with jokes, if you will. A spoonful of sugar helps the social commentary go down, and all that.
Her initial foray into expressing herself is acting; in the home-made video of a hippie member of their summer colony. Susie and little Edward (pronounced Edwid by his Brooklynese parents) run naked at sunrise with butterflies and she is still hoping like hell that the tape is long gone. She maintains the urge to find herself and registers most following events.
She documents the illustrious and the mundane with equal fondness. She has her first fight, and loses,(with tough puerto rican girls over a tire swing in the park). She sings her little jewish heart out at her presbyterian school’s Christmas pageant. She grows pendulous mammaries virtually overnight. She idolizes, then amazingly meets and spends an entire evening with Mick Jagger.
My favorite chapter / essay involves her rapid poltical change upon seeing the FICA deductions on her first paycheck. Calling Susie’s mother on the phone, her father says,” I’m watching our daughter turn from a communist to a moderate … whoops. Wait. I think she just went straight to conservative.”
Her fist real job is writing for The Jewish Week, where she enjoys tormenting the readers with homosexual rabbi articles and eating non-kosher foods.
I’ll let the reader discover her subsequent forays into employment for themselves. Suffice it to say, it is enjoyable. For us. Not for her.
Her growth and development from childhood to adulthood are well plotted through these humorous forays and she has written a very good memoir. A coup de foudre in the world of girly reminiscences.