ISBN: 0-916870-73-1
185 pp.
Size: 5 x 8
Paperback Original
Price: $7.95
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Unfortunate Woman, An
Barry Gifford
An examination of one woman's life, An Unfortunate Woman is the intimate story of Peggy McCloud, told according to the terms of the poet Muriel Rukeyser's Challenge: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/The world would split open." One hundred years ago Guy de Maupassant published Une Vie, a novel about Jeanne, a woman in late middle age, whose life, begun so hopefully, ends in betrayal, loss and disillusion. Like Maupassant's Jeanne, Peggy is a passive victim of the world's cruelty. Now fifty-eight years old, the whole of her adult life having been a succession of misfortunes, Peggy McCloud finds herself in difficult circumstances.
In an effort to discover how things went wrong, she recalls her life from its beginning and finally, after years of trying to conform to other people's idea of how she should behave, Peggy rebels, and begins to assert herself. Emily Dickinson wrote: "The truth is bald and cold,/But that will hold." Peggy McCloud tells a universal truth in An Unfortunate Woman. She is at last a woman with nothing left to lose, having lost everything she has been taught to believe was worth while. Her self-examination exposes the lies implicit in what she was taught, It is an effort to make others think about their own lice and to be victimized in the same ways.
Review: "...an extraordinary and curious book...a 'woman's story'-intensely individual and personal-that is written by a man."
-San Francisco Chronicle
Bio: BARRY GIFFORD's books have been translated into twenty-two languages. Forthcoming are his collected stories, American Falls, and Back in America, a new collection of poems. He can be found at www.barrygifford.com
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