PRETTIES
BY LINDA LAUREN
'Jessie was perusing the club in a slinky affair with a slit up the side and a thigh much too long for it. Her nails dripped blood red and her eyes glinted black ice. She had so much body, and so few uses for it, that it was bored. It tended to wander. She forgot about it and it slopped away. She'd suddenly spot a milky breast spilling from its silk and a creamy thigh creeping slowly from the top of its stocking...'
Quiet and withdrawn, Jessie's on the bread 'n' marge line with her mother and her mother's boyfriend Brian, all embarrassing eyes and clammy hands. Reality isn't so hot so she lives inside her head. Her only escape from the real world is her pretties box, sugar pink with a big satin bow, full of treasures from a childhood that went on too long or never really happened.
Then Steve comes along. Big, blond and safe, he's both protection form the world and a passport into it. But security becomes suffocation- Jessie simply isn't domestic bliss material- and when her fantasy man appears how can she resist? Through him she gets it all- a luxurious flat, more money and clothes than she can ever spend or wear, an endless stream of beautiful worshipping bodies, and Him- but at what price?
This vivid new novel gives remarkable insight into the pleasures and pitfalls of growing up female.
I first came across this author when I was 13, when a classmate brought in Honesty, and I took a look and found it hard to put down. (I've since re-ordered and re-read it as an adult, but sadly it hasn't survived being carted off to the charity shop, long before I began blogging.) My mum found Pretties at a jumble sale not long afterwards, and the copy I now have is another re-ordering, as it stuck in my brain so much.
I was inspired by this work for one of my MA submission stories, about a young woman's sexual awakening, and have just been inspired again to quote from it: “What's wild is wild and can't be caught...” for a recent short story about civilization and wilderness that I submitted to a competition. In my story, as in this book, a character is picking flowers.
Enough waffle. Apart from being really poignant, discussing feelings (especially of a lustful, sexual nature) that a teenage girl can relate to, I love the style in which the writing is delivered, which is a certain vagueness. This really seems to make you think between the lines, and hone in on what it is exactly that the author is trying to say (it's always good to really involve the reader in your work) and seems to get to the heart of the emotions of our main character, Jessie. It's sad that her dream man has an agenda once he re-meets Jessie (he always calls her Jessica) as an adult, and what she has to go through (seemingly willingly) to keep him, and how she escapes and how he (spoiler alert!) finds her again, and how she gets some kind of happy ending.
Those of us who have lived- like Jessie- on the bread 'n' marge line- will certainly relate to the social aspects of this novel, which is set in the late 1970s/ early 1980s, just before my teenage time. This has a good mix of characters who are, sadly, all too real to life. I can certainly spot at least one of each ilk in my own teenage years. It was great to re-visit this work, and live that life again. Indeed, those times, and the strong, melodramatic feelings that run hand-in-hand with being that age, have been the basis for my own writing work.
But whatever happened to this author? She wrote another book, named Sisters, then appears to have dropped off the face of the earth. Here's my review of that book:-
http://elainerockett.blogspot.com/2014/04/sisters-by-linda-lauren.html
There is a Linda Lauren who writes, but she's an American psychic, and writes about her craft. I'm guessing that my Linda Lauren is either A) dead or B) writes under another name, as I strongly suspect that Linda Lauren are her first and middle names, and that Lauren is not her surname. If any of you can shed some light on this matter, then please let me know, as I would love to read more of her work.
By
the way, the lovely pink hatbox was the inspiration for me making one
of my own whilst studying textiles at college. I did own a hat
(which I never wore) but no box, and had to make it out of woven
printed paper, and my artwork was inspired by Pierre Bonnard and
Jackson Pollock, so it wasn't pink like Jessie's hatbox... But
I've gone off on a tangent here...
