Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

It was more than just the title that made me want to read Susan Jane Gilman's Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, but for a while I couldn't remember who recommended it or where I first saw it. Why was it in my to-be-read pile, and how long had it been there? Finally I remembered that I'd read about it in June (2009) when it appeared on Kim's list of favorites.

Gilman is similarly hard to place, in terms of generation. Most of this memoir made me think she was a baby boomer, born in the 1950's. But she says her parents were hippies and that she was four years old in 1968. That makes her seem a bit young to say that she was "born just as the women's movement was catching fire" and a bit old for a childish ambition to be "an actress, a model, and a stewardess." And amusing as the title image is, it seems completely ridiculous to me that anyone born after all the episodes of I Love Lucy had already aired would believe that "a twenty-first century feminist" had to wear anything in particular--or forswear an entire category of clothing-- to keep her membership in the feminist club. Since this memoir is deeply rooted in New York City, perhaps it's that first-wave feminists there had a more stringent and longer-lasting dress code than the rest of the country? In the climactic title moment of the book, trying on a pouffy wedding dress, Gilman discovers third wave feminism:

"Why did it take so long to have this experience? Every woman should have this experience--and not only if or when she gets married. Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow-minded culture."

Yes, I'd like to know, too--why did it take you so long to have this experience? And why, in the post-1960's-free-love era, did you and your teenaged friends think that losing your virginity would make you "glamorous creatures"? How could it have taken you until your second year of college to realize that many of the people in NYC "saw themselves as characters" while truckers in places like Jarratt, Virginia "were of an entirely different ilk"?

And yet I couldn't completely hate this book. Gilman does have a way with words. I laughed out loud at the part where she describes trying to speak French and ending up "like the French-speaking equivalent of Latka Gravas on Taxi" (largely because my husband and daughter recently described my attempts to pronounce French words as like the double-voweled pronounciation of my son's Serbian chess teacher speaking English).

Also Gilman's story of a Thanksgiving dinner at Howard Johnson's when she was a kid is entertainingly told, and relates to the recent discussion here about the "truth" of memory:

"And so we inscribed it in our annals of the family: The best Thanksgiving ever. Occasionally, as teenagers, John and I prompted, 'Hey, remember that Thanksgiving we spent at Howard Johnson's?' Then we'd lovingly recall each detail, reliving our pleasure, our naive delight at the voluptuousness of it all....
Only years later, when we were waxing nostalgic about it again one morning, did our father audibly groan: 'Augh. That Thanksgiving we spent at Howard Johnson's. Was that ever a fucking nightmare.'
'Oh, it was horrible,' our mother agreed. 'The absolute worst.'"

When they find out their parents are getting divorced, Gilman and her brother overlay another version of "truth" on the memory:

"After our parents separated, John and I had the awful, nagging suspicion that...our entire home life had been like Thanksgiving at Howard Johnson's. Had we spent our childhood dancing around with ice buckets on our heads, thinking everything was just dandy, when really our parents were sitting there spellbound with misery? Apparently so."

So while I'm not going to run right out and buy the new book Gilman has just published (Undress Me In The Temple of Heaven, reviewed at A Bookworm's World), I might flip through it if I see it in the library. First I'm going to have to get all my friends and neighbors to vote for the library levy this fall--it's been a long dry spell at my local library--no new books. Looking at the shelves of "new" books there has been as disconcerting as trying to place Gilman in terms of one generation or another.

Do any of you identify with a generation? I never did until I heard of Generation Jones.