A
creative writing course I took years ago still causes me unease when I think
about assignments like “tastefully describe the torture to the death of a small
child,” “detail the sights, sounds, and smells of your last trip to the
bathroom,” and the daunting one that I could never bring myself to do: “assume
the persona of a teenage girl.”
I
probably dreaded the latter exercise so much because I feared resorting to
clothes-food-and-boys clichés that would expose prejudice as well as writing
competence.
But
if I had to confront it today and if the assignment involved the personality of
a slightly spoiled, somewhat innocent teenage Jewish girl inching toward
adulthood in the North End of 1950s Winnipeg, I would have one model to clutch:
True Confections, the 1979 Leacock
Medal book by columnist and diplomat-spouse Sondra Gotlieb.
True Confections, subtitled “Or How My Family Arranged My Marriage,” was an autobiographical
novel tracing the life of a girl from her “sweet sixteen party” to her marriage
a couple of years later. It talks a lot
about clothes, food, and boys.
Teenage
girls evidently think a lot about confections. Their preparation, consumption,
and impact on their bodies. For the party
that opens the book, the birthday girl insists on a long menu - a “layered sandwich loaf, iced with cream
cheese and olives ... sugared almond
shortbreads ... Russian Butter Cake.”
Verna,
the first-person narrator of the story, learns her mother’s recipes, takes a
job in her cousin’s restaurant, and fusses as much about the caterers as the
choice of a groom and intertwining of families at her wedding.
Always,
food and clothing issues swirl around the story, it never strays far from the
subject of boys. Boys like the awkward
Harvey Stone, who “is so smart that he thinks in parallelograms” and is from a
well placed family. Harvey would have
Verna for sure, but she only sees him as slightly better than Saturday nights
with her parents. Another was Kenny “the
milkman’s son.” “Kenny’s brown eyes had
a dreamy look ... His shoulders were broad and he was stronger than the boys
whose fathers were doctors (and ... and) ... Kenny was interested in the
mind.” I gathered this was all good
stuff for a teenage girl as the first half of the book devotes a lot of space
to Verna’s imaginations around Kenny. This stops when the sensitive Kenny is
spotted in the company of an older man and no female companions at the
Opera.
Vera
eventually falls into her “arranged” engagement to the South End Winnipeg,
educated, and well travelled Martin Manheim - M.M. The arranging did not mean dowries and
match-makers, merely encouragement from attitudes that doomed unmarried,
post-university women to the secular nunnery of graduate studies.
Attracted
to marriage as an excuse to drop out, Verna did most of the arranging by
allowing M.M.’s offhanded comment that his mother “thinks you might become her
daughter-in-law” to evolve into a presumed proposal. It seems to have worked out. Verna’s story ends with reference to
imperfect marriages but kind words about her own, which was then marking
twenty-two years of “getting acquainted.”
I
like the book, in part, because it celebrates Winnipeg, and the Leacock Medal
experience would not be complete if the only portrayal of the prairies took the
form of the small towns, wheat fields and big sky of W.O. Mitchell, Max
Braithwaite, and their kind. True Confections convinces you that some
people living there – in wintery Winnipeg - might not want to ever leave and
could even imagine it as the best place on earth.
This
might be my greatest resulting insight about the mind of a teenage girl. They live in places, have families, and have
lives, and my sources within the gender tell me that though food, clothes, and
boys are not to be ignored, these are just the ornaments on a personality.
The
personality in this book is that of Sondra Gotlieb for sure,[i]
but not the caricature of privileged social climber that haunts the real life
Sondra.[ii] In True
Confections, as Vera and her teenage girl self, Gotlieb is candid,
self-deprecating, and self aware. So,
one other thing I learned about young women is that they can be clever and
funny.
Maybe,
I should give that assignment another shot.
Maybe, I just did.
[i] Sondra was married to Harvard-Berkley-Oxford
schooled lawyer Allen Gotlieb, eventually the Canadian Ambassador to the United
States. She was also a cook book writer
by the time this, her first novel, was written. Later she contributed to
Maclean's and Chatelaine magazines before starting her well known columns in
the Washington Post. Over her career,
she produced articles for Saturday Night, the New York Times, and The National
Post.
[ii] Like the fictional Verna, Gotlieb was born in 1936 and
married her older, scholarly husband in 1955.
They had three children Marc, Rachel, and first of all Rebecca, who was
born just a few years after the marriage which was commemorated in the closing
pages of the Leacock Medal book. When True Confections was written, Sondra
Gotlieb’s first child was just entering university and starting studies that
would lead to several degrees and a career as a lawyer. Sadly, Rebecca, who also wrote columns on
occasion, passed away with cancer at only 44-years of age in 2003. The Gotliebs
live in Toronto.