Marilyn June Coffey

This was a really good book. First off, I don't know much about Jimmy Hoffa except that he lived in Michigan and he is buried all over the Country! So, this book told a lot about the man and his practices, which were not on the up and up. He was mean and corrupt. Tom Coffey took the rare stand against him for many years (20+) until he finally sold his Company so that he did not bow to Hoffa. Gutsy and honest. The book is told by his daughter, Marilyn. It is well written and I enjoyed her style. It was easy and fast to read. I would recommend it. I did enjoy it.… (meer)

Almost from the outset, Marilyn Coffey’s Marcella put me in mind of Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding. In that novel, McCullers’s principal character, Frankie Addams, is roughly the same age as Marcella and wrestles with many of the same demons. And although both stories are sadly revelatory of the inner contortions a girl must pass through on her way out of childhood and into adolescence, this is where the similarities end.

Coffey’s character (the eponymous Marcella) is more explicitly drawn—perhaps indicative of the age in which we live and of what a writer can now permit herself to express in print. I should perhaps mention, however, that what I’ve just read is the 40th Anniversary Edition. Given that Marcella first appeared in 1973, I’d venture to say that Coffey was way ahead of her time.

The backdrop of Marcella Colby’s story—her younger sister, Lucille, her parents, her home life in general—suggests a sterile field in which anguish and obsession would inevitably take root and flourish. While a sympathetic reader might wish for a mother (the father almost doesn’t bear mention—and so, Coffey gives him short shrift) whose same gender, at least, would render her a willing partner in Marcella’s awkward passage through early adolescence, all we get is a wooden prop, a virtual cipher. Marcella’s mother is, in short, deadwood — and Marcella is consequently set adrift to find her own emotional moorings.

At the prompting of a school acquaintance, Marcella happens to wander into a church. Not just any church, mind you, but an Evangelical church. Her epiphany—this day and this place in which she is “saved” by a certain Brother Morgan and his retinue—only serves to contort her mind further and to make her entirely beholden to an all-seeing, all-knowing God. It is, moreover, Marcella’s now fervent belief in this omniscient and omnipresent Being that drives her, by degrees, deeper and deeper down into a cauldron of shame for what she feels is a blasphemy of the most heinous and despicable sort: the discovery, through masturbation, that she is a sentient being. Unfortunately, however, and in the absence of someone to tell her differently, she can conceive of her masturbation only as a “filthy, perverted habit” (p. 192).

Enter Brother Morgan (aka “Big Jim”) once again—but now as what Marcella perceives to be an almost heaven-sent guide, protector and trustworthy confidant. Their communication opens in letters that Marcella is only too happy to write—frequently, imploringly, keeping almost lockstep pace with her autoerotic sessions—and leads to an invitation to spend a couple of weeks far from home at a camp for young Christians. Brother Morgan indeed delivers. But what he delivers in the form of temporary relief and happiness is something those more world-weary readers among us will likely find suspect from the get-go. I, for one, wasn’t in the least surprised when, on the occasion of a one-night sleep-away at the conclusion of Marcella’s two-week stay at “Big Jim’s” camp in Colorado, the absence of his wife, May, and the absence of a sleeping bag for Marcella quite predictably led to Brother Morgan’s laying on of hands (please excuse the obvious double entendre).

Marcella returns home the next day—not precisely deflowered, but spiritually and emotionally debauched.

Is Marcella in any sense a didactic story? Is this novel a Bildungsroman of the sort that was once so popular in German literature? Only in the sense that we, as readers, can feel the anguish of Marcella and wish — as she does at one point late in the story — that it might somehow be possible to turn the clock backwards. Turn it backwards — or force it to jump ahead to a point where Marcella will no longer be demonized by her own fingers and tormented by the knowledge that she may be less than “a perfect Christian” (ibid).

As happens so often in life and literature, religious indoctrination butts heads with human sexuality. Depending upon the nature and extent of our own earlier catechisms, we know this from personal experience. In literature (apart from my earlier citation of Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding in which, thankfully, religion doesn’t play any significant role), I was reminded towards the end of Coffey’s novel of Peter Shafer’s play, Equus — which, coincidentally, was written and appeared on the London stage in the same year Coffey’s novel was first published (1973). In the same way in which Alan Strang put iron spikes through the eyeballs of the too-vigilant horses under his care (representing, in the case of his sexual initiation, an all-seeing God), Marcella, in a violent attempt at self-mutilation, tries to cut ...

But no more teasers. Better you should read Marilyn Coffey's novel for yourself to discover Marcella’s fate. What I will say by way of conclusion, however, is that the forty years of social progress we’ve enjoyed since this novel’s first appearance made much of it feel almost medieval in its depiction of character and event. Let’s hope that by the time the 80th Anniversary Edition appears, some of those same characters and events will feel positively pre-historical.

RRB
10/17/12
Brooklyn, NY
… (meer)

from author's website: " Tuesday, September 12, 2006 IN SHORT; NONFICTION By FRAN HANDMAN Published: March 25, 1990 GREAT PLAINS PATCHWORK: A Memoir by Marilyn Coffey. (Iowa State University, $21.95.) The novelist Marilyn Coffey has put together an entertaining, insightful collection of stories, combining fact and legend, about her beloved central plains between the mid-1880's and the late 1950's. ''Like a speck on the eastern horizon appears a wagon loaded with Coffeys,'' who in 1885 migrated west to the Great Plains from Illinois. # There were 10 of them - great-grandfather James, his wife, Mary, their seven sons and a daughter. The Coffey boys were a raucous bunch who liked a good joke, usually physical, and would try anything once - great-uncle Ben even entered a ''bear-wrassling'' contest and won. Stories of the family are integrated with graphic firsthand descriptions by survivors of the natural disasters that periodically struck the Plains - floods, grasshopper infestations, tornadoes, man-made mischief on a grand scale. Ms. Coffey offers insights on what it is to grow up in Middle America. It ''gives one a different perspective on history than the typical Easterner has, an inside-out view.'' As a child, she ''never doubted for an instant'' that she ''was dead center in the middle of everything . . . a world narrowed by dust storms, bread lines, and Al Capone.'"… (meer)

I enjoy reading stories like Mail-Order Kid: real accounts of historical events as recalled by individuals who lived (suffered?) through them. Coffey focuses her book mainly on the recollections and personal records of Theresa Feit, who rode on an orphan train from New York City to rural Kansas in the early 1900's. She understood that her mother had given her to an orphanage/hospital run by a group of nuns in NYC; as the number of orphaned and/or abandoned kids rapidly rose, many of these children were rounded up and sent west to families in less-populated areas of the country. Mail-Order Kid chronicles Theresa's life, from her earliest years in New York City through adulthood and into her life as an elderly woman. Although not a literary masterpiece by any sense (there are grammatical errors, and many passages are strangely worded), the book is fairly easy to read, and keeps a lively tone that made me stay up late several nights to finish it.… (meer)