The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll : The Search for Dare Wright

Rating:
Summary: A Stunningly Beautiful Biography
Review: As a kid, I loved reading Dare Wright's "The Lonely Doll". I was always fascinated by her incredible black and while photographs of Edith and the Bears and how gentle thier poses where. Many years later, I read an excerpt about this book in an issue of Entertainment Weekly, which quickly rekindled my love for Wright's book and I immediately ran out and purchsed a copy.

Once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. Jean Nathan(the author), who visited Dare during her final days before her death, did an excellent job on her research about Dare and her family. While keeping a neutral position on some of the shocking revelations she encountered (such as a possible romance between Dare and her brother Blaine), Nathan has done an excellent job crafting a tale of pain, loss and lonliness that Dare had experienced throughout most of her life. By the time the reader reaches Dare's later years (which was during the deaths of her mother and Blaine), you are feeling sympathitic about Dare and can now understand the hidden messages throughout her books.

If you have been a fan of her work since you where a child (or have just become one after reading this), this book showcases all the good, the bad, and the ugly time that Dare has been through. And, after reading this, I have become even a bigger fan of Dare's work. Now, everytime I look are her photos, I can see how much she put her feelings into each and everyone.

Rating:
Summary: Contemptible
Review: Filled with factual innacuracies and riddled with speculative innuendo, this is a perfect example of what Joyce Carol Oates has termed "pathography". Pathography is a new sub-species of biography, which sets its standards much lower than quality literature. Oates writes that,"(Pathographic biographies)so mercilessly expose their subjects, so relentlessly catalogue their most private, vulnerable, and least illuminating moments...As in a court of law to which the (deceased) defendant has no access, a trial of sorts is launched; evidence damningly presented; the testimonies of old friends, acquaintances, rivals, and enemies honored."
The vulnerable and multi-talented Dare Wright deserved much better.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent non-fiction that reads like fiction
Review: I have to commend Jean Nathan for finding a story that must have been difficult to follow. What an amazing story to find about an author of books many people, including me, read as a child. The Lonely Doll books weren't my "favorite" books; I tended to love animals books. I did see these books as a child. I liked them for the story but since I was young, I didn't have the slightest notion that the author might not have been a happy, well adjusted adult.

Reading this book as an adult makes me appreciate my family even more. My family may be odd, but we aren't over the edge. That is how I would describe Dare Wright's family as described in this book. The amazing dynamics of this family kept me reading and interested in this story.

My only questions are how much of the story is true and how much is fantasy from Dare Wright herself. If Wright didn't leave diaries and others didn't live with her who did, how much is left out or changed from the real story?

The only issue I had with the book was the rushed last chapters. It seemed that the part of Wright's life after her mother died was full of interesting and complex events, but there wasn't much to read in this book. Was that due to lack of material or exhustion on the part of the author? Not that I am going to search out the answer for myself, I just wonder what the rest of the story is.

Whatever the truth, this is such a bizarre story, it wouldn't be believed if it were fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Most over rated book of the year
Review: I just don't get it. I was so looking forward to reading this book that I waited until my midterms were over and then set a whole day aside to read it. I shouldn't have bothered. Granted, some parts were really interesting and I kept looking at Dare Wright's beautiful pictures to imagine her strange life but it certainly wasn't gripping enough to make a real impression. I was expecting a really juicy read and it was just kind of flat. So her mother was over protective! So she had a platonic crush on her brother! (It's understandable in context because they were seperated very young). And a lot of the strange things that happened to her later in life are because she was simply an alcoholic.
It gave me a lot of facts and impressions from a writer who didn't even know her but at the end I knew very little about what emotionally made up this strange woman.
This book was a huge disappointment and I really wanted it to be great.
If you want juicy bizarre reads go for a Howard Hughs or Truman Capote biography. Even Tatum O'Neil's autobiography was more interesting.

Rating:
Summary: OMG This book is brilliant!
Review: I remember THE LONEY DOLL series very well as a five year old beginning reader. But I also remember having the creepiest feelings about the book(s). By the age of seven, they sat in my bookcase at home untouched (I still have the books). Everytime I thought of that doll's strange blond hair and human poses not to mention Mr. Bear taking her over his knee and spanking her, I got the shivers. I always wondered who could have written such strange children's literature -- and now I know all about the life of THE LONELY DOLL's even lonelier author. Jean Nathan has done an incredible job -- wonderful from the first page to the last. And I'm not just saying this because I went all through school -- Pre-K to 12th Grade -- with Ms. Nathan. Jean, congrats -- you've written the book of the year as far as I'm concerned. This is a must read.

Rating:
Summary: Virgo Intacta
Review: In her prologue to The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright (2004), author Jean Nathan states, "without expecting or even wanting it, I knew I had stumbled onto the exact thing that drive my entire professional life: a good story," and indeed she has: the book is both a labor of love and a mesmerizing biography of children's author, model, and photographer Dare Wright, an odd, multitalented woman whose entire adult existence was tightly and claustrophobically framed by a remarkable if unhealthy example of Freudian Family Romance.

Wright, who remained a virgin until being tragically raped by a vagrant in old age, willingly allowed herself to be dominated by her assertive mother, society portrait painter Edith Stevenson Wright, while most of the conventional romantic attraction she felt for the opposite sex was bestowed on her only sibling, brother Blaine Wright, who returned her ardor and devotion in full. Upon meeting Wright and her mother, some people thought them a lesbian couple rather than a mother and daughter, while Dare and Blaine, meeting again after over twenty years of separation, considered marrying one another and simply hiding their sibling relationship from the world.

As presented, the story of Wright's life continually approaches the pathological without ever irrevocably crossing the line; prevailing WASP social protocols, conventions, and mores of the era apparently protected Wright and her family from public as well as private exposure, though the preponderance of their friends seemed to sense something bizarre was occurring, decade after decade, without ever confronting the Wrights or asking the kind of impolite if common sense questions that would have exposed the family's incest - leaning eccentricities.

Nathan herself frequently seems strangely complicit in this peculiar arrangement; though she mentions that mother and daughter slept in the same bed whenever together throughout their lifetimes, it is only in a very late chapter that the reader learns that mother and daughter not only shared the same bed, but slept tightly wrapped around one another like newlyweds.

And while Wright, who never married, may have carried herself with poise and sophistication, the photographic evidence provided does not bolster the argument that Wright was a great beauty, though this seems to have been the prevailing consensus throughout her lifetime, and a belief Nathan shares. The occasionally repulsive photographs reveals a hard - featured, mannish woman who borders on the homely; in some photographs, Wright strongly resembles a transvestite, while in others, she projects a strident, imperious attitude that suggests a compensatory neurosis as well as a deeply rooted narcissism. Unsurprisingly, Wright's beloved alter ego, the toddler - sized doll "Edith," who starred in Wright's best selling series of photographic books for children, had the smallest nose imaginable, while Wright's was unmistakably large, thick, and upturned.

Wright and her mother professed to live happily in a fantasy world of their own creation, a brittle fairy tale world centered around private, all - night costume parties and compulsive photography sessions. This world quickly collapsed after her mother's death, when Wright sank quickly into lethargy, delusion, and alcoholism. Though Nathan encourages the belief that Wright genuinely suffered from painful social isolation throughout her adult life, the hard facts suggest that Wright lived an enviable life in many ways: she was friends with international social luminaries like Greta Garbo and Gayelord Hauser, was actively pursued by a number of handsome, dedicated, and well placed men, was financially stable, traveled freely around America and to Europe at whim, and seems to have had very little difficulty achieving success as a fashion model, commercial photographer, and author.

In fact, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll repeatedly begs the question of how Wright was able to achieve all that she did in fields not known for sensitivity and subtly if she was as paralyzingly timid, withdrawn, and introverted as Nathan claims. Wright was exceptionally talented, but talent and social connections alone cannot explain how Wright navigated the endless series of auditions, interviews, photo shoots, and business meetings that her multiple careers required over the decades.

The blond "Edith" doll was a multi - prismed reflection of Wright's fixation on her emotionally troubled childhood and broken home; while "Edith" was partially Wright's idealized doppelganger, the doll's name was identical with her mother's, who was known as "Edie" rather than Edith, and thus reflected Wright's unusually strong identification with and submersion in her mother. Throughout her adult life, Wright treated "Edith" like a living creature, conversing with "Edith" for hours on end and introducing the doll to visitors as if it were alive. Clearly, "Edith" was a fetish object of inordinate power and fascination for its owner.

As a recent article in the New York Times illustrates, some parents and educators today find the influential, recently reprinted Lonely Doll books to be politically incorrect at best and unwholesomely sinister and sadomasochistic at worst. As Nathan makes abundantly clear, the series did reflect Wright's own ominous psychological landscape, but were also clearly vehicles in which she could confront the complexes that ensnared her. Elements of ambiguity and conflict are necessary in all fiction, and each Lonely Doll book eventually achieves a helpful resolution of some kind. The series should be commended for not tacking on standardized, conflict - free happy endings.

Spanking, a prominent element in each book, was a commonly accepted method of parental discipline throughout most of Wright's life, and the doll's glamorized and slightly sexualized appearance is no different than the erotically charged decorative cherubs still common at Valentine's Day. Children's literature, from the works of George McDonald, Lewis Carroll, and J.M. Barrie to L. Frank Baum's Oz series and the Dr. Seuss books, have often contained ambiguously threatening elements to which children cheerfully respond; such elements are clearly intended to be correlatives to the sources of anxiety in the child's own life.

If Wright's personality ultimately remains elusive, Nathan has done an excellent job of documenting her concealed, secretive, and liminal existence.


Rating:
Summary: facinating, disturbing
Review: Like many others, I first read "The Lonely Doll" at the library as a small child. I was an avid reader, and this book was checked out over and over with the Oz series and other classics. When I found a used copy five years ago, I started crying in the bookstore from happiness! Reading about Dare Wright's life has put it very much in perspective as to why children are drawn to her work. Certainly, people who had stable and happy childhoods should not be excluded from loving these books, but I find that anyone who has had to deal with a more complex upbringing is that much more attracted to the emotion on every page. Many children are scared that they will be left, and Ms. Wright's books offer assurance and comfort. It's absolutely tragic that no one could intervene on behalf of Ms. Wright who, clearly, needed this assurance for her entire life. Jean Nathan is very tactful when speaking of the relationships between Dare and others, and the book is as well researched as one could hope for given the circumstances. Bravo for Jean Nathan's labor of love, and for wanting to share this story.

Rating:
Summary: The Mysterious Dare Wright Revealed
Review: My original copy of The Lonely Doll was without the jacket photo of the author and so I always assumed (because of the spanking scene, I guess) Dare Wright was a man. I never suspected the strange psychology of the writer belonged to a woman, and a knock-out blonde bombshell, born in Toronto at that. What was the impetus behind the book that left such a strong impression on the collective unconsciousness of so many women who read the book when they were little girls?

Jean Nathan does a good job of stitching together a life that was so unravelled. Were it not for the many photographs Dare Wright left behind, her biography would barely hold together--not because of the efforts of Jean Nathan, but because Dare lived such a vaguely etched life, as ethereal and remote as Edith and the bears.

This was a biography I read start to finish, returning again and again to the photographs in the text, then to my original pink gingham copy of The Lonely Doll and back to the text, trying to figure out at least a part of the enigma of Dare Wright. Just as the story of Edith stirred me as a girl, the story of the author is just as compelling, but strangely leaving me just as tantalizingly unsettled.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Psychological Profile
Review: This was a wonderful psychological profile. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed Dare Wright's books as a child but this look behind them made them even better. The author had unique materials and resources to use and did an admirable job of piecing the puzzle of Dare's family and issues together. I'm not sorry I read it, only now I want all her books that are out of print! Even if you've never read her Edith books, if you enjoy bizarre family relationships a la Grey Gardens, this is a great read.

Rating:
Summary: Eccentric Bio
Review: With out a doubt you are captured by the attention to detail of this book. Very hard to put down. Page after page of the extremely "Odd" relationship between mother and daughter. She can not seem to break away from this relationship, even for a moment. This is truly a rare and different type of story. One that will keep you guessing about just how deep the relationship is.
Memoirs to read: Nightmares Echo, Sickened,A Paper Life