To the Queen, food had ever been the one, true, never-failing source of pleasure in life and she ate often and earnestly, would have eaten more often and more earnestly did not a nagging little voice from the region of her conscience lift itself to say that food might be the cause of fat, and fat was the danger of the world to beauty. And what would be so bad as to lose that greatest gift? To the ordinary person, maybe going blind or falling down hopelessly paralyzed might compare, but these catastrophes seemed of small consequence beside that one.
--From Good Morning, Young Lady
Ohh, how I loved those scenes with the Queen and her boxes of chocolate - and Dorney, finding a closet full of the empty boxes, imagined a great party but never dreamed the Queen had eaten them all herself. This is GREAT WRITING. My college professor started reading the novel (at my insistence) and handed it back. He was president of Western American Literature, one year, yet he failed to see the brilliance of this great American novel, a Cinderellla story set in the Old West, with Butch Cassidy as... prince? See for yourself. :-)
ReplyDeleteArdyth grew up in a social and family world that impressed upon her that getting fat was a terrible thing because then you couldn't be beautiful, get a husband, or get into the movies in Hollywood. She struggled with this expectation and with her weight as a young woman and no doubt wrote the story of the Queen from personal knowledge of that struggle.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, here's a note that Ardyth wrote to accompany a picture she sent to a cousin--see if you recognize the scene from GMYL:
ReplyDelete"This is the Troy Laundry where Mother went to work at 15 [or 16; Ardyth wrote one number on top of the other, but I don't know which was the correction]. Ten hour days then and VERY hard work. Once the laundry workers had a picnic out at Salt Air and one of the girls ate so much she fainted, and they had to cut her corset strings and Mother said when they did, it sounded just like a pistol shot. Pow!"