Description:
Remember Jacy Farrow, that stunning, icy beauty in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show? In his novel of the same name, Larry McMurtry based his character on childhood friend Ceil Cleveland. Says Cleveland: "In modern American literature, especially Texas literature, Jacy has become an archetype: a beautiful, flirty, teasing, bitchy blonde in a convertible.... Now this Jacy wants to tell her story... my story." What might seem a good--if slim--idea upon which to base a story or an essay becomes, in Ceil Cleveland's hands, surprisingly full and rich. What was it really like to grow up smart, pretty, and female in a southern Texas town during the era of The Last Picture Show? Sharing stories about the women in her family, the bigotry and fear that dominated the real town of Archer City, the birth of her interest in writing, and finally her escape, this the "real&Quot; Jacy Farrow. Cleveland introduces each chapter with the epigrammatic wit of such notables as Andre Gide, Edward Albee, and Dorothy Sayers, whom she quotes as saying, "Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force." Cleveland treats us with her evolution into--if not the misbehaving Jacy--the articulate, accomplished, feminist professional she becomes in this rueful but earnest, richly remembered memoir.
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