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Bezig met laden... The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright (2004)door Jean Nathan
Books Read in 2016 (3,174) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. If you were a girlchild of the 1950s, The Lonely Doll was on your nightstand. It told the story in pictures of Edith, a glamorous doll living on her own, who is befriended by two teddy bears, Mr. Bear and Little Bear, and they become a family. There was always something creepily fascinating about it, maybe the fact that since the illustrations were all photos, I took it as fact, as opposed to books with drawings, which meant fiction to me. There was also the shock of seeing Edith, with her grown-up hoop earrings , getting spanked by Mr. Bear, neither of which, the spanking nor the earrings, had never happened to me. Somehow The Lonely Doll always haunted me, and I was not alone. Jean Nathan, the author, tried tracking down the book in the early '90s and ended up finding the author, Dare Wright, as well, right before her death by alcoholism. Researching Dare's background, she learned that her parents, Edith and Ivan, separated early on in their marriage, with Ivan keeping custody of older son Blaine and daughter Dare living with Edith. The children were not allowed to contact each other until after Ivan's death, as adults. Edith was a renowned society portrait artist based in Cleveland, and she and Dare were inseparable, sleeping in the same bed until Dare moved to New York and became a model and a photographer. Edith resented Blaine and he despised his mother for ignoring him and keeping the siblings apart. Dare was unable to form romantic or sexual attachments due to Edith's demands for all of her time and attention. Edith was a monster in the mode of another mother/daughter symbiotic hellish matchup, Edith (!) and Little Edie Beall of Grey Gardens fame. This is a fascinating study of the outcome of maternal selfishness, and Dare's success as an author and photographer did little to make for a happy or fulfilling life. Dare Wright was the author of "The Lonely Doll" books. Dare's life is fascinatingly glamorous, tragic and odd. Her dysfunctional upbringing created a grown virginal woman unable to form intimate, sexual relationships with men, preferring that they act more as her playmates. She and brother Blaine, who were separated by their divorced parents when they were very young, reunited as adults but their relationship was a confused combination of romantic love and childlike play. Dare's mother Edie, although indifferent to her children when they were young, went on to form a tight, oppressive and somewhat inappropriate relationship with her daughter. Dare's life was so tied to her mother that upon Edie's death, her own life fell apart. You can't help but feel sorry for a woman who was never permitted or encouraged to be independent and reach her emotional potential. There are two telling reviews on Amazon.com for The Lonely Doll:one entitled "Paging Dr. Freud" and the other entitled "Dolly Dearest." Both of these monikers are apt for this biography of The Lonely Doll's author, Dare Wright. Dare Wright, the product of a fabulously dysfunctional marriage of a failed actor/writer and a portrait artist was raised by her narcissistic mother who denied that her divorced husband was alive and that she also had a son whom she abandoned after she divorced her husband. Dare was also initially ignored and only used by her mother as an attractive accessory to her active social life. Later on, as mother Edie became older, she attached herself more tightly (and jealously) to her daughter - going on dates with her, taking all holidays with her and even sleeping in the same bed. Dare, never grows up and has feelings of abandonment throughout her life. To cope she immerses herself in a life of fantasy - dressing up, having a desultory acting and modeling career and finally carving out a career for herself as a photographer. Ultimately, at her mother's apartment, she discovers an old doll she had as a child. She names this doll Edith and it assumes the role of her own child and, along with two Teddy bears who are symbols of the father who abandoned her and the brother who was taken from her, she develops a new "family" to replace the one she never had in real life. This new "family" becomes the basis for a series of "Lonely Doll" children's books that were popular from the late 1950's through the early 1980's. Through these stories, Dare expressed her own fears of abandonment and her desire to have a safe haven in a stable family. Many people now find these stories extremely disturbing (as evidenced by the customer reviews on the Amazon web site), but the books, three of which were re-released in the 1990's, remain popular to this day. Dare and her mother, Edie's, lives were similarly disturbing. Her life is truly a version of "Mommy Dearest" with Edie being pretty much the archetypal monster mother, and ultimately, she had a very sad end. Paging Dr. Freud, indeed. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderscheidingen
In 1957, a children's book calledThe Lonely Doll was published. With its pink-and-white-checked cover and photographs featuring a wide-eyed doll, it captured the imaginations of young girls and made the author, Dare Wright, a household name. Close to forty years after its publication, the book was out of print but not forgotten. When the cover image inexplicably came to journalist Jean Nathan one afternoon, she went in search of the book--and ultimately its author. Nathan found Dare Wright living out her last days in a decrepit public hospital in Queens, New York. Over the next five years, Nathan pieced together Dare Wright's bizarre life of glamour and painful isolation to create this mesmerizing biography of a woman who struggled to escape the imprisonment of her childhood through her art. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Nathan’s deep look into Dare Wright’s life shines a lot of light on The Lonely Doll for those of us who absolutely need to wring out every drop of information when a charming picture book catches our eye. The biography itself is a great read, and it’s going to be hard to restrain myself from discussing the entire book, but I think I can rein myself in and stick to just the information that answers the whys asked of The Lonely Doll and Dare Wright. Maybe.
Bare bones background. Dare Wright was born in 1914 to portrait artist Edith Stevenson and failed actor/writer/farmer Ivan Leonard Wright. Married in 1910, they also had a son named Blaine in 1912, and the marriage dissolved in 1917 when Ivan abandoned Edith and moved to New York. Their marriage had been marred by financial difficulties that caused them to continually move around, and Edith, also called Edie, became so estranged from her family during this time that she was forced to send Blaine to stay with his paternal grandmother, who in turn sent him to live with his father. When the divorce was final, Edie sent word to Ivan that she never wanted to see or hear from him or Blaine ever again, and she never again married or even had a serious romantic relationship. Dare tracked her brother down 25 years later, but her father had died before she finally reconnected with Blaine.
Dare had several courtships in her life, and was even engaged to marry a pilot when he returned from duty in WWII. The pilot was one of Blaine’s best friends, and the union seemed a good idea but Dare was uninterested in sexual intimacy. The pilot had an affair with a married woman and when Dare found out she ended the engagement. Her education was spotty at best but she was intelligent, very artistic like her mother, and capable of learning all sorts of useful skills. She attempted to become a professional model and actress but lacked the drive to pull it off and The Lonely Doll was her attempt to establish herself as a writer and photographer. Though her books were and still are quite successful, Dare’s personal life was far less so. She never had a sexual relationship, remained more or less with her mother in some manner until Edie died, and descended into alcoholism and died after several years as a severe invalid, requiring constant hospitalization.
This is a part of a much longer discussion of this book on Odd Things Considered. If you would like to read the entire thing, click here: https://www.oddthingsconsidered.com/oddtober-2020-the-secret-life-of-the-lonely-...