Bookmarked

Reading My Way from Hollywood to Brooklyn

By: Wendy Fairey

Narrated by: Christy Carlo

Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

Wendy Fairey grew up among books. As the shy and studious daughter of famed Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham - F. Scott Fitzgerald's lover during the last years of his life - she began as a child reading her way through the library Fitzgerald had assembled for her mother and escaped into the landscape of classic English novels. Their protagonists became her intimates, starting with David Copperfield, whose sensibility and aspirations seemed so akin to her own. She felt as plain as Jane Eyre but craved the panache of Becky Sharp. English novels squired her to adulthood, and Bookmarked is a memoir of that journey.

In a series of brilliant chapters that blend the genres of personal memoir and literary criticism, we follow Fairey, refracted through her reading, as student, wife, professor, mother, grandmother, and happily remarried writer. E. M. Forster's Howards End helps her cope with a failing marriage; Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay teaches important lessons about love and memory. Like Eliot's Daniel Deronda, she learns only as an adult of her Jewish heritage (and learns also the identity of her real father, the British philosopher A. J. Ayer). In this intimate and inspiring book, Wendy Fairey shows that her love of reading has been both a source of deep personal pleasure and key to living a fulfilling and richly self-examined life.

©2015 Wendy W. Fairey (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Great Messages

I did get a lot out of the story the numerous mispronounced words was a terrible distraction.

Too Many Mispronunciations

I enjoyed the narrator's pleasant voice & believable performance. However, she mispronounced many words. Proust is "Prewst," not "Prowst." Diderot is "Dee-der-oh," not "Did-er-ott." Vita Sackville-West is "Veeta" as in "Vel-veeta," not "Vita" as in "vital." The name "Ezio" would be pronounced "Etzio" in Italian, not "Essio." Montmarte is "Mon-maa-truh," not "Mont-mart," like "K-Mart." The St. Denis neighborhood of Paris is pronounced "Sahn Dinee," not "Saint Dennis." Fecundity is pronounced with a hard, not a soft, "C."

How inspiring the author's mother, Sheilah Graham, a penniless orphan, rose to such heights and how proud she must have been when her daughter became a celebrated English professor. F. Scott Fitzgerald's "College of One" was obviously a great success.

The author might want to reconsider her assertion that walking through Beverly Hills is so scarce as to seem legally prohibited. It might have been true when she lived there sixty years ago, but no longer (even more so since the pandemic). Each street is lined by its own particular variety of tree, many now nearly a century old, providing a great deal of pedestrian-friendly shade (except for the streets lined with beanpole-like palm trees). Most homes have expensive and well-tended gardens in the front lawns. It is like walking through a park, and many take full advantage.