Borrowed Finery: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written - but didn't engage me
Review: "Born in the twenties to nomadic, bohemian parents, Paula Fox was left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage..." What a range of people she had caring for her over her growing up years, what neglect at times, what an interesting range of geographic locations she lived in during her childhood. This "memoir" seemed to hold such promise, but really I found it a chore to read. A collection of memories, not always connected up, it never hooked me in, leaving me eager to find out what happened next. It also completely lacks any analysis - of the characters, events, Paula's reaction to them, the impact on her life, etc. Its main redeeming feature for me was its brevity - had it been longer, I may well have given up. Maybe if I was a fan of her novels (certainly her memoir is well written), or interested in other members of her family (apparently she is Courtney Love's grandmother), I would have been more motivated to enjoy rather than just tolerate this book.

Rating:
Summary: Borrowed Finery
Review: Born in the 1920s to nomadic & bohemian parents, Paula Fox is left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage, then cared for by a poor yet cultivated minister in upstate New York. But her parents, as always, soon resurface. Her handsome father is a hard-drinking screenwriter who is, for young Paula, "part ally, part betrayer." Her mother is given to icy bursts of temper that punctuate a deep indifference. How, Fox wonders, is this woman "enough of an organic being to have carried me in her belly?" Never sharing more than a few moments with their daughter, Fox's parents shuttle her from New York City, where she lives with her passive Spanish grandmother, to Cuba, where she roams freely on a relative's sugarcane plantation, & to California, where she finds herself cast upon Hollywood's grubby margins. The thread binding these wanderings is the "borrowed finery" of the title--a few pieces of clothing, almost always lent by kindhearted strangers, which offer Fox a rare glimpse of permanency. Vivid & poetic, Borrowed Finery is an unforgettable book that will swell the company of Fox's devoted admirers.

Rating:
Summary: Marlon Brando NOT Courtney's Grandpa
Review: Great book, but the customer review alleging that Marlon Brando sired Courtney Love's mom is untrue. In an exclusive interview with The Oregonian, Paula's daughter and Courtney's mother Linda Carroll angrily confirms that her father is NOT Marlon Brando.

Rating:
Summary: Wrenching
Review: Hard to take all this in, how Paula Fox not only survived, but in some ways thrived and lived to write a memoir of her wrenching childhood. Her nutso parents (loving but out-od-his-depth father, cold and rejecting mother; both more interested in their own lives than in her) dropped her at an orphanage shortly after her birth in 1923. A series of mostly kindly people passed her on down the line, but of course there were scars.
From the distance of old age, Fox writes with careful prose and elegant understatement about her unimaginably tragic youth.
Beautiful, and very, very sad.

Rating:
Summary: best book in years
Review: I had never even heard of this author and a friend was reading it at work and couldnt put it down. Immediately I was taken over by the story and her writing which made me feel I was right there living and experiencing what life was like for her.Her characters are so true and she writes with such honesty and wonderful description. I ended up ordering every other book she has written for adults and then when I asked other people about her it seems the whole world has read Paula Fox and loved her work except for me. IM so glad to have discovered her and reading her memoir makes reading her other books even more special.Even Oprah recommended her. I just keep passing Borrowed Finery on to everyone I know and so far they have had the same reactions as I have. I think this book should win alot of awards.

Rating:
Summary: A brave and elegant account of Ms. Fox's unhappy childhood
Review: In the unhappy-childhood sweepstakes, practically everyone I know is a contender. My father ran off with a neighbor when I was 14. My mother drank. This friend was beaten. That one was sexually abused. It's a wonder we all made it to adulthood. But we did, and with a sense of ourselves that may be keener because of the pain we grew up with. Kids who are hurt become, inevitably, observers --- they must master their feelings, anticipate attacks, live with abandonment. They must see clearly.

This Paula Fox does, without self-pity and with enormous elegance and understatement. In BORROWED FINERY, the story of the first 20-odd years of her life, she shows us pathological parents, remote from the normal pathways of love: She was barely allowed to be a child at all, in the ordinary sense of being nourished and cared for. It is her mother and father who are the kids in this book: a reckless, feckless, quick-witted, handsome, and thoroughly self-destructive pair. Having abandoned Fox at birth, they proceeded to waltz in and out of her life --- never really taking responsibility, but not letting her forget them, either.

Fox's parents did not hit or rape or starve her. They simply weren't interested and were not often present. And their behavior, when they were there, was so antiparental (unparental is not strong enough) that it boggles the mind: Upon hearing Fox observe that her room-service tray had no milk on it, her father threw the dinner out of the window. She went to bed hungry. He borrowed (and never repaid) fifty dollars from her when she was 11 or 12 and took back a typewriter he'd just given her. Her mother once "fixed" Fox's toothache by taking her on a terrifying car ride through the mountains.

One is appalled but fascinated and grateful that Fox wasn't relegated entirely to the world of orphanages and foster care. "By chance, by good fortune, I had landed in the hands of rescuers," she writes, "a fire brigade that passed me along from person to person until I was safe." The first and foremost of these was "Uncle Elwood," a Congregational minister who, out of the goodness of his heart (they were not related), took care of Fox in her early years, making room for her "real" parents from time to time. They lived in a town called, unbelievably and aptly, Balmville. "I would have been one of those children found in a wilderness, written about in case histories, if it had not been for Uncle Elwood," Fox writes; "I had learned civility and kindness from him."

After that sanctuary ended, her life morphed into a crazy-quilt of hand-me-down clothes and serial schools and temporary arrangements --- trains not met, bills not paid, affection not given. The cast of adult characters was always shifting, and no one seems to have been entirely in charge. Maybe that's why Fox's chapter headings are place names, not people: Hollywood and New Hampshire, Long Island and New York City, Florida and Montreal. In a way, she brought herself up. Forced to assess what each person or relative would be to her and learn --- yet again --- how to fend for herself in every new situation, Fox became an expert at uncertainty: "I knew how to behave in parlous circumstances, to temporize and compromise, a lesson taught me by my father." Her father, a screenwriter, also passed on book lore, taught her to swim (cruelly) and drive (patiently). "I had begun...to notice an impulse in him --- noble, he would have called it in someone else --- to teach," Fox writes. But his "servitude to alcohol" got in the way.

Fox gives her readers enough time-and-place markers to know when and where we are, but her book isn't a saga heavy with detail and rich in long, rolling sentences. It is a montage of scenes and epiphanies, as if portions of her past had suddenly been made visible by a flash of lightning, and the writing is vivid and precise and spare. On her first meeting with her father, at the age of four or five: "The word father was outlandish. It held an ominous note. I was transfixed by it. It was as though I had emerged from a dark wood into the sudden glare of headlights." And at the other end of the book, as she struggles with adulthood, "My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth."

It is taking nothing away from Fox's originality to say that BORROWED FINERY is strikingly Dickensian: her abandonment as a baby, not to mention the array of eccentrics --- Uncle Elwood could have walked straight out of David Copperfield, name and all --- who rescued and rejected her. And there is a twisty, almost Victorian symmetry in the final chapter (the surprise is too good to give away), where Fox defies her chaotic upbringing and reasserts a sense of family. Like Dickens, who also had an abysmal childhood, she not only has moral intelligence, but she knows how to tell a hell of a good story.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

Rating:
Summary: Life Without Father¿Or Mother
Review: Paula Fox is the writer of six fine novels that have just come back into print. Borrowed Finery is a memoir of her life that provides us with a collection of small episodes extending from childhood through her teen years. I hate reading memoirs, but decided to read this one to get a better understanding of Paula Fox the Novelist. Nothing much pleasant transpired during these years; the brief incidents that we hear about are, perhaps, the only ones she feels at ease telling.

Her parents simply didn't want to raise her. Father was a screenwriter, and mother was offended by a daughter who disrupted her life by being born. Both were heavy drinkers. Ms Fox's father seemed to have some affection for her, while the mother reacted to Paula as if someone had let some mangy, un-housebroken dog into the room. Young Paula was sent to live with a variety of people during her life, and she never knew how long she would spend with any of her caretakers. For some time she was taken by her grandmother to her great grandmother's Cuban plantation where she was left totally on her own. She got up, went to school, came home, talked to some of the servants and went to bed without any contact with the grandparents.

It was a sad life for a child, but Ms Fox grew up, married, and wrote 21 children's books and her excellent novels. By the way, she is also Courtney Love's grandmother.

Borrowed Finery also provides some insight into the mind behind the characters and themes in her books. My suggestion: read her memoir and her novels.

Rating:
Summary: Borrowed Finery
Review: This is certainly the best book of the year that I have read.She spares us nothing of the torment of her life;yet it is told with such simplicity and elegance. anyone who considers themself a serious reader owes it to themselves to read this memoir.

Rating:
Summary: disappointingly bland...
Review: To write a childhood memoir devoid of sentimentality is both a technical challenge and a brave narrative decision.

It is also a big mistake.

Whilst one can accept Fox's premise of piecing together childhood memories to create an impression of her childhood and a sketch of her unconventional parents as it seemed to her at the time, one cannot help feeling short changed by her decision not to elaborate on the emotions she felt at the time or looking back now.

Don't get me wrong. I am not looking for a Dave Pelzer approach. However, Borrowed Finery feels cold and detached as a piece of work and it is hard to engage with the narrator or her stories.

The sections of the book that work best were the very beginning and the very end. Her early years with Uncle Elwood were enchanting and it is a shame the reader never discovers what happens to this kind and loving man, in many ways the hero of the book. Also, the final meeting of Paula with her mother is charged with emotion, so much so that it further highlights the lack of emotion elsewhere in the book.

The biggest failure of all, however, is Fox's neglect of the background story to her parents. They are a crucial part of this book and their irresponsible attitude to their daughter demands to be fleshed out with some further narrative.

I am sure the story of Paula Fox's childhood is a remarkable and moving one. Sadly this book is neither.