Bookmarked

February 16, 2015
For context, it matters that Fairey's mother was famous Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham, the final lover of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who mentored her reading and who died in her house. As Fairey explains in this literary bildungsroman, her life as a reader began with the classic novels which Fitzgerald bought her mother and which she grew up with on the family's bookshelves. Fairey has told the story before (One of the Family), but here she achieves a satisfying intertwining of Graham's life with her own: the personal (boarding school, graduate school, marriage) and professional (as college administrator and teacher.) She matches each stage of her life to a different literary character, mostly from 19th century and early 20th century British novels, including David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Portrait of a Lady, Howards End, To the Lighthouse, and A Passage to India. As the book closes, she finds herself on a "steep learning curve," discovering a new world of Indian writers in preparation for a trip to that country. Bookish folk will relish her conviction that literature speaks directly to personal experience; readers who share her special interests will find themselves engaged, even in disagreement, with her critical analyses. Memoirs of Hollywood, and of children's recollections of the famous, abound, but this very bookish one, uniquely, is rereadable.

February 15, 2015

Fairey (English, Brooklyn Coll.) grew up loving literature and often shunned offers from her renowned Hollywood gossip columnist mother, Sheilah Graham, to attend lunches at the Brown Derby and movie premieres in order to stay home and read William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte. In this memoir, Fairey combines her mother's world, including the death of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham's then husband, in the apartment they shared, with her own academic career to provide a literary analysis of how the books Fitzgerald selected for her mother and her to read in his College of One shaped their lives and Fairey's goals. Her premise is that classic novels are based on prime movers: the orphan, the new woman, the artist, and the immigrant. Fairey ties these to multiple paths to her quest to know her father who lived in England, Graham's story as a woman who reinvented herself from an orphan to an acclaimed columnist, and her own relationship with her current partner. All this falls in between the pages of the novels David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and To the Lighthouse, along with several others. VERDICT This is not Fairey's first attempt to document how her life was impacted by her mother (College of One and One of the Family), but the focus here on literature provides a fresh approach to the topic. This memoir enables readers to confirm how works of fiction shape lives.--Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL

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