8.26.07 Katherine Taylor & Alison Weaver
Rules for Saying Goodbye follows a fictional Katherine Taylor as she makes her way from a farm-town girlhood toward the cosmopolitan adulthood she imagines for herself. From a Massachusetts boarding school to a dissolute life in Manhattan to a stint in Europe that culminates in a failed engagement, Rules explores the comic undertones of tragedy and disappointment, homesickness and loss, and the dynamics of contemporary middle class American family life.
Katherine Taylor has won a Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares. Much like her fictional alter ego, she has burned bridges in London, Rome, and Brussels, but now lives in Los Angeles.
Essential Links
Read an excerpt from Rules for Saying Goodbye
Toronto Star Review
LA Weekly Review
SF Gate Review
Want to score a copy of Rules for Saying Goodbye? Leave a question for the author, and if we use it on air, you’ll win!
Gone to the Crazies tells the story of a young woman’s search for identity and mental equilibrium. It follows her from her childhood on the Upper East Side of New York City to a “therapeutic rehabilitation” boarding school in the mountains of northern California, where she is sent at fifteen years old and remains until graduation at eighteen. Cascade is more cult than cure, and within the surreal isolation of the school’s mountain campus, she leaves her old self behind, warping into a brainwashed model of Cascade’s mottos and ideals.
Upon returning to New York City in 1996, she is fundamentally lost and begins to ingest copious amounts of drugs to fill the emptiness that has always been quietly present. She quickly falls into a frightening and reckless addiction that eventually forces her to examine the hazy mess of her life and find the sanity she has long been searching for.
Essential Links
Read an excerpt from Gone to the Crazies (pdf doc)
HOW Literary Journal
PlayPhilly.com Review
Want to score a copy of Gone to the Crazies? Leave a question for the author, and if we use it on air, you’ll win!
Felicia, great choices, as always, both books I’m very curious about. For Alison Weaver - What advice would you give your teenage self about coping with Cascade if you could talk to her? Do you think you were somehow more susceptible to this brainwashing than the other students/did they also react similarly? Looking back, do you think there’s anything positive you gained from being there?
thanks, rachel! great questions and terrific books. more tk!
cheers, f.
Both of these sound fascinating. I’m interested in how both deal with illusions: Rules for Saying Goodbye with the illusions we create for ourselves as we dream up a life somewhere else, and Gone to the Crazies with the illusions others create for us/around us that we fall into. So much of the world is about illusions though, isn’t it? I don’t have a specific question but I find this idea of illusions interesting and wonder how it plays a role in the books and how, or if, the characters were able to break free of the illusions they had to find themselves.
great question, lor!!
Alison, I am one of your little sisters from Cascade. In your book, you describe my most personal life experiences. You published photographs of me from when I was 16 years old, and included details of traumatic experiences from my youth. I am appalled and totally shocked that you did this.
I have not heard from you in 10 years. My questions for you are, how do you rationalize your behavior? Do you think that exploiting the life story of a former ‘friend’ is ethical? And how would you respond to my recent lesson learned? The lesson you just taught me, and the truth to all this, that there is No One I can trust.
Hey little sister. I believe you to be incredibly brave, and Al is absolutely bursting with love every time she writes about you. She is not attacking you. She is expressing love and sorrow and empathy and sympathy for you, and I believe that the only people you have to really worry about knowing your identity -if that is your concern- are grads. I am a grad, and yes, I know and loved very deeply many of the people she wrote about. I don’t find it to be exploitive. I have been looking for this book for nearly 13 years, and entertained thoughts of writing my own story. It took alot for her to do this. I have yet to hear of a single smooth transition into the “Real World” from THAT PLACE. But we’re still here, and that’s saying alot. Love you Al, love you grads, dropouts, love you little sis.
SURVIVORS.