At
its heart, GIRL TALK is about a great fear shared by many women
coming of age --- becoming our mothers. It shows how it always
happens when you least expect it and that there is no avoiding it.
But most importantly, by the end of Julianna Baggott's stunning
debut novel, one has learned to accept this fear with grace and
dignity. Just like Mom would want.Lissy Jablonski is almost 30. She is an ad executive in
Manhattan. Her first love has come to stay with her and ends up
marrying her stripper ex-roomate --- and Lissy is pregnant by her
married ex-lover. The power of these events culminates in a comic
flashback to what is known throughout the book as "the summer that
never happened." Lissy was 15 years old that summer. Her father ran off with a
redheaded bank teller, and she began to realize that everything she
knew about herself and her family was a lie. Amid a cast of vividly
drawn characters, Lissy begins to come to terms with the secrets
revealed during her comforting "girl talks" with her
mother.In
an attempt to spare her daughter the humiliation of her father's
moral misstep, Dotty Jablonski takes Lissy away from her New
Hampshire life to the only refuge she can think of: the home of her
rich college friend, Juniper Fiske. The Fiske family, including
children Piper and Church, are possibly the oddest refuge for the
Jablonski women during that fateful summer, considering that
Lissy's parents met at Juniper's wedding. They are the type of rich
people we all know: Piper is teenaged and sullen; Juniper,
valium-addicted and high strung; and Church is boyishly handsome
and impressionable. Perhaps the most compassionately drawn
character, Church Fiske is the kind of guy that every girl has had
a crush on, the kind of guy that stays with you years later, still
holding onto the part of your heart that believed love was easy.
When Church joins Lissy and her mother at their next refuge, his
impressionable soul becomes forever wary of the life of excess he
is used to. He falls in love with everything middle class and sets
the tone for the man he will become.It
is also in the home of Dino and Ruby Pantuliano that Lissy gets to
know more about her real father, Anthony Pantuliano. A dwarfish man
with a rather impressive body, Anthony is the first --- and
seemingly only --- true-love Lissy's mother ever had. Although
Anthony does not know he is her father, Lissy becomes attached to
the persona of him. She has both been raised by a man who loves her
greatly, and created as a result of a great love. The importance of
these two men in her life finds its origin during that summer that
never happened. Throughout the stay with the Soprano-like
Patulianos, Lissy begins to form the basis of what her therapist
refers to as an Electra Complex and to learn to understand why her
mother is who she is.GIRL
TALK is wildly funny and benefited much in this reading by being
set in an easily identifiable era. With references to WHAM! and the
explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, it becomes easy to
interpose oneself with Lissy. Statements such as "My earliest word
association with president is crook," make the novel both timely
and timeless. We could be talking about Nixon, or anyone for that
matter.