Pretend We Are Lovely
Page 22
“Shut up, Enid.”
“I’m just saying.” Enid pulls her mask back around to the front. Her silver shoes slap the bottoms of her feet with each step.
“All right, girls. I think your mom can spare two pairs of shoes she hasn’t worn in . . . let’s just say—”
“Forever,” says Vivvy, I think. Behind the masks, it’s hard to be certain who says what, but it sounds like Vivvy.
“What about the pumpkin-head buckets? I know they’re sort of wonky. I just got them as backups. But I’m sure you noticed the candy inside was full-size!”
“We saw,” one of them says.
“You don’t want it?” I say. “You must have gotten a lot trick-or-treating, huh?”
They look at each other, shrug, and look away.
“No, no, no, no! Enough of that and the dry toast business,” I say. “I got you those and the costumes you are wearing right now because I love you and it was Halloween. Take off the masks, girls.”
“Aww.”
“We’re sleeping in them.”
“Take them off,” I say. “Please. I need to see my girls.”
They do. Enid holds her mask at her side and the new dog, Lowell, licks the inside like her breath is liverwurst. Vivvy pushes hers to the top of her head like a scary headband.
I clap once and rub my hands together. “Don’t go anywhere,” I say. “And shut your eyes.”
I go out to the porch and return with the pink box. I slide the costumes’ packaging out of the way and set the box down on the counter. “No peeking,” I say. I think I hear the tiny wind of Enid sucking in her breath but her eyes are closed. I look to Vivvy, who fusses with something under the sleeve of her costume.
“Now,” I say, “I have an important question for you both and, as your father, I require that you answer me honestly.”
Enid is worried; Vivvy looks mad.
“Are you hungry?” I say. “Have you eaten anything?”
The fight in each girl is plain on her face: to find somewhere she can live in between feast and famine, mother and dad.
“Have you eaten anything ? Are you hungry?” I say.
I take Vivvy’s hand. I take Enid’s hand. And I pull my girls, hold tightly on to them in the center of the room. I put them right in front of the pink box and they open their eyes, see it laid out before them. Tomorrow we’ll eat vegetables, but tonight is Holly’s gift and their own special V and E.
“We should eat,” I say.
We should eat.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the support of many writers, editors, and literary arts organizations for their generous support of this novel: Jubal Tiner, editor of Pisgah Review; Andrew Gifford, director of the Santa Fe Writers Project; and Mary Elizabeth Parker, founder of the Dana Awards. And to my patient and beloved editor at Tin House Books, Masie Cochran.
I offer great thanks to my small cast of experts: Nancy Reid, Todd Schroer, Okla Elliott, Ken Gillam and Shannon Wooden, Garret Merriam, and Maurice Hamington. Thank you for helping to fill in the cracks of memory and invention. And much gratitude to my best readers along the way: Patricia Beltran del Rio, Melissa Cossey, and Andy Mullins.
Book Club Questions
1. With which character do you most identify? Why, and in which moments of the book?
2. How would you characterize Enid and Vivvy’s relationship as sisters? How does each girl affect the other in good and bad ways?
3. What is each character’s relationship to food? How do their attitudes toward food and their bodies change over the course of the book?
4. How do Francie’s food and body image obsessions affect Enid, Vivvy, and even Sheldon?
5. Francie leaves home twice in the book. What is it she wants back in Boone, North Carolina and does she get it?
6. Sheldon’s death devastates Francie, but she doesn’t leave until seven years later. Why?
7. Why does Tate make the choice not to follow Francie on Halloween?
8. Is it significant that the novel ends on Halloween? Why do you think the girls dress up as Francie?
9. If you were to give each family member a piece of advice, what would it be?
10. If this novel were a film, who would direct it and who would play the leads?
Dear Reader,
Pretend We Are Lovely began as a narrow crack of light. I was living the last weeks of a two-year fascination with shrinking my weight as far down as it could possibly go. I had lost 181 pounds in that time and the constant worry, scratchpad of daily calorie counts next to the kitchen scale, and nervous jumping jacks before bed, weren’t worth the long string of all the wrong men that thinness bought me.
I can see this now, of course, but at the time, there was little more than pitch-dark grief in my life. I began to write the Sobel family, and I gave each character pieces of my fears about food and fat so that, maybe, they could make sense of them or at least carry the burdens away from me. It was all I could see then and certainly there were no easy, or even good, answers.
But as the book unfolded—the lives of Francie and Tate, Enid and Vivvy, and even poor Sheldon—my darkness crumbled and that narrow crack of light spread wider for me, just as I hoped it would for them, and hope for all of my book’s readers, most especially you. Each of us finding our way to comfort and love and pretending we are lovely until we get there.
All the very best,
© JESSE & GENA PHOTOGRAPHY
NOLEY REID lives in Newburgh, Indiana, with her two best boys.
PRAISE FOR PRETEND WE ARE LOVELY
“A family must navigate the secret currents of guilt, obsession, loss, and—most dangerous of all—hope in this pitch-perfect examination of two Southern seasons in 1982. In prose that ambulates between stark, hallucinatory, fuddled, and chewy according to the guiding character’s point of view, Reid masterfully denies her novel the impulse to solve its characters’ problems, leaving the reader with the brutal task of lingering within their experience.”
—KIRKUS, Starred Review
“An outstanding, unflinching novel about starvation and indulgence, family and self. Noley Reid writes profound, raw characters with guts and grace. This is one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read.”
—SHARMA SHIELDS, author of The Sasquatch
Hunter’s Almanac
“In Pretend We Are Lovely, Noley Reid captures what it is to have to be a parent while still a child in the most true and perfect way. Even more magically, she captures the reverse, calling on the children inside us with so much empathy that we come away able to laugh at the pain that makes us wise.”
—TUPELO HASSMAN, author of Girlchild
“A novel that will make you laugh and also break your heart in all the right ways . . . Told with wit and charm and compassion, this novel resonates with all that we hunger to have and all that feeds us.”
—LEE MARTIN, author of The Bright Forever
“A book fat with love, full of tender absurdity and absurd tenderness, a story that artfully depicts the first aches and thrills of adolescence while also unmasking the unslakable thirst that slips with us into adulthood.”
—ALETHEA BLACK, author of I Knew You’d Be Lovely
“Hunger shapes the intertwined narratives of Noley Reid’s searing and clear-eyed novel, wherein no one escapes unscathed the emotional starvation of a family.”
—LESLIE DANIELS, author of Cleaning Nabokov’s House
“Readers will be spellbound by this intimate portrayal of a family told in a symphony of voices—each member of the Sobel family’s search for redemption equally urgent and compelling. Like the best love songs . . . sad but hopeful, raw but tender, shocking but, ultimately, deeply comforting.”
—JULIA FIERRO, author of The Gypsy Moth Summer
and Cutting Teeth
Copyright © 2017 Noley Reid
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the p
ublisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Reid, Noley, author.
Title: Pretend we are lovely : a novel / by Noley Reid.
Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, OR : Tin House Books, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016056391 (print) | LCCN 2017011472 (ebook) | ISBN
9781941040669 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781941040676 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Family secrets--Fiction. | Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3618.E5453 2017 (print) | LCC PS3618.E5453 2017 (ebook)
| DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056391
First US Edition 2017
Interior design by Diane Chonette
Cover design by Diane Chonette
Cover Illustration: Helen Dardik
www.tinhouse.com