Order Lavina Today!
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Novels by Mary Marcus
New on the Blog
The Curse
Every family has its own myths. One of the longest running narratives in mine growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana was my mother’s early promise as a writer. One that was thwarted, not in the usual way by marriage and having a family, but by not winning a writing competition sponsored by one of the studios while she was at USC. This is roughly how the story went. When she was in college there were two very gifted student writers. One was the novelist and screenwriter Sidney Sheldon, and the other was my mother, Ruth Futernick. According to my mother they were friends and rivals, goaded on by their famous mentor, Professor Baxter. We heard the story every time Professor Baxter hosted the Disney Family Hour. There would be Dr. Baxter on the TV, and then there would be mother’s fond recollections of his classes on literature. And how she and Sidney both vied for his favor. And how she lost and Sidney Sheldon won. “You can still write that book!” I would tell my mother. Though we all knew that mother was never going to write her book. The most I ever saw of her writing was a few inflammatory sentences written on an Angel LP cover, in which she seemed to be writing to her boyfriend. I never figured out if the boyfriend was going on when she was married to my father or after he died. We certainly never saw any grown man around the house except Smith, who came to pick up Aline and drive her home. Or one of my father’s three brothers when they came to town to check on the store he’d left behind when he died. When Mr. Sheldon became a...Penis Envy
I don’t “get” the remote control. I’ll go further than that. Only if I have detailed written out instructions can I achieve both picture and sound on the flat screen that shines in the corner of the living room mocking me. Consequently, I don’t watch much television. Which is probably good. Though sometimes, I will download something from HBO and watch it here on my little computer screen. Back in the Dark Ages, I used to enjoy flicking the thing on once in a while, back in the days when all one had to do was hit a knob and there weren’t so many channels. I remember a particularly wonderful Christmas Day years ago. Husband and son were off skiing. I was home alone, working on Lavina, and eating an avocado sandwich for Christmas dinner. The set we had in the bedroom wasn’t much bigger than a desk size computer screen. I switched it on to the old movie channel (no menu, no variety of dingus-es, to point and press) and there it was, “The Manchurian Candidate”: my Christmas present from the powers that be! Lawrence Harvey, Angela Lansbury with a side of avocados eaten in bed. Nothing like that will ever happen to me again. I digress. I am not alone, in this mystification concerning the remote control. A mystification that I am sure Freud would have something topical to say about. For it is true: possessing a penis enables its bearer to wield better remote control action. Just as possessing a penis enables its user to pee with impunity in places where a woman would not dare. Just as possessing a penis enables its owner to head most corporations, direct most movies, wage a majority of the wars...
Gender Inequality or Why I Got The Shirts
Once in a while like today, I put on one of my “famous artist” shirts. I always keep them ironed and on hangers from the dry cleaners. One is from Turnbull and Asser, another is from Mr. Fish, and the third is from some Bond Street tailor and is actually bespoke. They are all I’m guessing from the 1970’s. Unfortunately the bespoke one has a small hole in the front. I keep meaning to ask my friend Valerie if she’ll embroider something over the hole. H, who died several years ago, gave me the shirts. They belonged to her husband E, who was a well-known Abstract Impressionist from The New York School. She gave them to me after he died, because she said E liked me. I certainly liked him. He was charming, Spanish, funny and I loved his work. He was also very kind to me about my writing. Which I appreciated. He was close to a hundred when he died and was old enough to remember being in Paris at the same time as Sartre. He was always talking about Paris before the war and other topics of glamour at the dinner table. He spat when he talked and his accent was so thick a lot of the time it was hard to understand what he said. It would be a lie to say, I would rather have three of his old shirts than one of his paintings or collages, though I ended up with a collage that was hanging in my mother-in-law’s bedroom moldering away in a frame she bought at some art supply store. When she died, I got the thing reframed and it’s in my living room. It’s not, I must say, one...
The New Me
Lavina
Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Books-a-Million • iBooks • Indiebound • Indigo • The StoryPlant