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Thursday, December 10, 2015

Featured Author: S. Jane Gari

Welcome Today's Featured Author

S. Jane Gari!!!
 
Losing the Dollhouse (memoir) by S. Jane Gari

Tag Line: A slice of dysfunctional Americana complete with divorce, stepfamilies, eating disorders, mental illness and the search for true love.”


Synopsis:

My mother and father divorced when I was seven. Within a year, both remarried.

My stepfather, RICK, had two daughters, SARAH and ANNA, and my younger sister SOPHIE and I were often at their mercy. Anna invited me to share her bedroom and fondled me. When my eight-year-old sister was left alone with Rick, he called her into his bedroom where he stood naked, masturbating.

In high school, I fell asleep on the floor of our living room. Rick woke me by straddling my back and reaching under my shirt to unhook my bra and touch the sides of my breasts—one of many uncomfortable encounters. When I moved to New York to live with my father and attend college, I told my stepmother everything. After a year of keeping it to herself, my stepmother told my father, who nearly lost his mind. He called my mother, who sided with Rick—a betrayal nearly impossible to forgive.

Two months after starting my career, I told my sister that one of my colleagues was sexually harassing me. She informed my mother who ironically insisted that I have the man fired. Her hypocrisy floored me. It drove me to destroy the childhood dollhouse my mother had made for me.

My efforts to come to terms with life in general were bolstered by the energy of new love: BRENDON. With his support, I confronted my colleague and Rick and felt tremendous relief. Brendon proposed, and I packed up my life—sorting through it, piece by piece. When I came across the tiny fireplace my mother had handcrafted for the dollhouse, I packed it carefully. It had survived to await its new home where it would warm my new family with the fires of love that, despite the past, will never be extinguished.


Praise for Losing the Dollhouse:
"It takes tremendous courage and strength to share the most vulnerable parts of our lives with the world. I thank S. Jane Gari for giving a voice to important issues and victims that are all too often ignored." 
--Ashley Rhodes-Courter, Author of the International Bestseller, Three Little Words

“Gari matter-of-factly and without sentimentality shares the silenced horrors she endured from her stepfamily and a mother who allowed it. I found myself cheering for her as she navigates her way toward a voice of her own.”
--Kerry Cohen, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

“Gari has written a beautiful, bighearted book on family secrets, memory, and most of all, the power of love and forgiveness.”
– Mary Elizabeth Williams, Author of Gimme Shelter and Stage 5: A True Story of Love, Cancer, Science, and Survival


EXCERPT:
Prologue

I dragged the enormous dollhouse up the flight of stairs to my first apartment. It rested on the landing for a few minutes while I wrestled with an impulse. Inertia. I think that was the enemy that drove me to do it. Anger, hot and sticky, coiled around my fingers and cooled into a decision.
Gently, I pushed the dollhouse down the stairs. At twenty-two, I still thought it was better to exorcise old demons instead of making them holy through conversion. Destruction may not be the high road—but it’s easier.
My mother had nestled plastic daisies in tiny flower boxes beneath tiny windows. She had stained plywood in dark mahogany tones and scored it by hand to create the illusion of rich hardwood floors we could never have afforded on a larger scale. In ceramics classes, she had honed the skills necessary to craft an entire bathroom in miniature and bring to life a stone fireplace from which I would hang tiny stockings cut out of green and red construction paper every December. I cherished the fireplace the most: it was the heart of the dollhouse.
After five states, and twice as many moves, the dollhouse acquired the botched look of layers of paint that show through one another—the price of my desire to create a miniature of every new home.
Letting it careen down the stairwell of my new apartment was the perfect revenge. TTTTThe news of its demise would hurt my mother; I knew this. I also knew that when she asked about the dollhouse that I would feign incredulity and tell her it had been an accident, and she would doubt the lie, but could not prove it or bring herself to call me out. This was the tacit game of retaliation we played for years. And at the risk of sounding like the child that I was, even as a young woman… she started it.
The biting irony was that I had planned to give the dollhouse to my own daughter one day, if I ever had one. In the meantime I wanted to use the three-story masterpiece as a small armoire to house my books and journals, as the tiny home was equipped with two doors that rested on hinges. One could marvel at the little world like a giant who had opened the life of a family like a large children’s book.
Now its fate would become something altogether different, housing no stories, never again feeling the delicate wonder that is the hand of a little girl imagining a world. Instead it would epitomize the brokenness stranded in the wake of a mother’s betrayal: pieces of a home.
And now I was done with it. I wanted to see its colors break on the staircase. My body shook with each report the dollhouse made as it broke into innumerable wooden shards that I would sweep up later, the violent remnants of my vengeance already tempered with tears of regret. At least I had saved the fireplace from the rest of the dollhouse’s fate. But I steeled myself against remorse by reminding myself of what my mother had done. Although I loved her despite her obstinate heart, I could not bring myself to forgive her. Not yet.
The dollhouse cart-wheeled down the stairs in a spectacular denouement. The front door, once fastened securely to its post as gatekeeper, spun violently as it ricocheted from side to side down the stairwell. The windows crunched into oblivion. The soft crumpling was out of place with the rest of the cacophony; all those years I had thought they were real glass, but they had only been plastic my mother had painted with white stripes.
When the churning wreckage had come to a stop, there was just a pile of broken pieces. These I picked up gingerly, even lovingly, and carried them in bundles to the dumpster at the far corner of the parking lot. I wanted to smell its pieces mixing with the garbage of strangers, so it would disappear.



Losing the Dollhouse trailer on You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDMOaGYS9wM


About S. Jane Gari:
S. Jane Gari lives in Elgin, South Carolina with her husband and daughter. Three adapted chapters from her memoir, Losing the Dollhouse were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Jane has also co-written Flush This Book, a collection of humorous essays.
Links:
Twitter: @sjanegari


Interview With S. Jane Gari:
  1. Can you tell us a little about your book?
Losing the Dollhouse is a memoir that offers a slice of dysfunctional Americana complete with divorce, step-families, eating disorders, mental illness and the search for true love.
When I was 19, I finally worked up the nerve to expose the truth about her stepfather's sexual advances, and my mother was outraged. But not at my stepfather. My mother took his side-a betrayal that threatened to destroy our family and left me struggling to forge my own identity as I entered adulthood. Once marriage was on the table, I packed up my life and resolved to stare my demons down.

  1. What inspires you to write?
My daughter inspired me to write the memoir because she makes me want to be a better person, and part of that process involved letting go of the heavy burdens in my own past. Writing allowed my to do that, to just put it down and let go of fear and anxiety and achieve forgiveness and peace.
  1. Do you have a favorite spot to write?
My kitchen table is where I’m most productive. It’s comfortable and sunny and near our screened-in porch. Most days I can leave that door open and almost feel like I’m outside. If I don’t go outside enough during the day, I don’t feel grounded.
  1. Do you listen to music while you write?
I do. It can’t have any words though, or it has to be in another language. I listen to classical, instrumental jazz or Gregorian chants when I write.
  1. When did you know you wanted to write a book?
I started writing stories when I was 10 years old. I’ve wanted to write a novel for years, but when I was a full-time English teacher I would get burnt out reading and correcting other people’s writing, and when I carved out some time for myself, writing always got relegated to the back burner somehow.
  1. Do you work with an outline, or just write?
I always start with an outline so I have a grip on the material and then deviate from it once I’m in the zone and have a few chapters under my belt.
  1. If you could spend 24 hours as a fictional character, who would you chose?
I would be Quentin Coldwater from Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy. Grossman’s novels transport you to a fantasy world that’s Narnia meets Harry Potter for adults. Quentin is an intelligent, sensitive badass with magical powers. I would love to be him for a day.
  1. What's one random fact about yourself that you can share?
I believe that reincarnation explains the coexistence of profound intelligence and altruism alongside the blundering and selfish idiocy in the world.
  1. What are you working on next?
I’m completing one last round of edits on my novel Shakespeare’s Daughters before it goes out on submission, and my book with the Idiot’s Guides series, The Idiot’s Guide to The Healthy Gut Diet, will be out next summer.





 

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