Beach Trip by Cathy Holton

Author:Cathy Holton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345515148
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-07-29T04:00:00+00:00

Mel was a junior in college when she decided to become a writer. Pat Conroy had come to Bedford to give a reading and Mel’s American Lit professor had assigned the reading as extra credit. The class was called “The Vicious Circle: The Effect of the Algonquin Round Table on the Literary Landscape of the 1920s.” Mel was hooked from the first Dorothy Parker quote she ever read: “My land is bare of chattering folk; / the clouds are low along the ridges / and sweet’s the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges.” She quickly found a copy of Enough Rope in the library and followed it up with Parker’s short-story collections, Laments for the Living, After Such Pleasures, and Not So Deep as a Well. Big Blonde was Mel’s favorite short story. She read it over and over again, along with some of Parker’s literary criticisms (“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force”) She typed up “I shall stay the way I am because I do not give a damn,” and hung it above her bed where she could see it every morning when she awoke.

Not that Mel had any illusions of becoming as good a writer as Dorothy Parker. She read very few of the “literary” novels that Sara and J.T suggested she read. Her taste in novels ran more to Elmore Leonard, Tony Hillerman, PD. James, and later, Carl Hiassen and James Lee Burke, good writers who knew how to tell a good story without boring their readers to death. Pat Conroy talked a lot about writing from personal experience, and there in the darkened auditorium it suddenly occurred to Mel that she could do this. She could become a writer. Why not? She would graduate in another year and a half with a degree in English and a minor in art history, and she had no desire for grad school or teaching or working in some dusty museum or gallery. Or, worse yet, moving back to Howard’s Mill and taking over Leland’s car dealership, a prospect that filled her with dread not only because Leland was so actively promoting it, but also because she was so seriously considering it. (The money would be good and she would be the boss. It would be better than some grubby nine-to-five office or retail job, where she’d have to work long hours for low pay and answer to a hierarchy of pinheaded bosses.)

There had to be another choice. And so on that soft spring evening in early March, listening as Conroy droned on and on about life and art and truth, his words clanging in Mel’s head like a discordant fire alarm, she thought again, Why not? Now that she had discovered Dorothy Parker, a normal life was unthinkable.

She’d always known she wasn’t like other girls. She’d always known she wouldn’t settle. Growing up with Leland and Juanita for parents had done that to her,

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