My Little Blue Dress

by Bruno Maddox

Overview

“Very funny . . . A pitch-perfect account of how it feels to be part of as culture that’s better at showing you what to wear than what to believe in . . . a real original.”—New York Magazine

A gorgeous girl recalls her coming of age in her tiny, picturesque English village at the turn of the last century. After she opts out of a rural beauty pageant, her life—and its telling—begins to unravel. And it unravels into a multitude of extremely amusing, searingly beautiful strands that eventually lead her, and a troubled young man who befriends her, through the wall upholstered hellholes of modern Manhattan toward a heartrending and hugely satisfying climax that will almost literally blow your socks off.

“Fun, full-throttle stuff, which rather miraculously dresses down the pernicious personal-history trend while remaining both giggly and moving in its own terms.”—Entertainment Weekly 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101191057
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/26/2002
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	454 KB
Age Range:	11 Years

About the Author

Bruno Maddox is a Harvard graduate and former book reviewer for The New York Times and The Washington Post. He took over the editorship of Spy magazine in 1996, elevated it to within spitting distance of its former glory, then accidentally drove it out of business after two short years.

What People are Saying About This

Kurt Andersen

Not since Mailer and Roth has a novelist had the gall to refer to himself...in the third person....
— (Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century)

William Monahan

A brilliant satire...with an ending that will blow you away...a full-scale love story, a profoundly inventive romp of a novel, and very, very, funny.
— (William Monahan, author of Light House)

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
At once a slyly subversive deconstruction of the memoir and a satirical history of the 20th century, this first novel by the former editor of Spy magazine boldly wanders across genre lines, landing in a unique literary space that can only be called tragicomic. What begins as an old woman’s retrospective on her life -- from childhood and sexual coming-of-age in a turn-of-the-century British village, through wartime travails in London and a lesbian tryst in Paris, into the beatnik ’60s, marriage, and modern times -- is eventually revealed to be a fabrication composed by a narrator named Bruno Maddox, who is trying to write the entire tale in the course of a single night.

The book’s second half, which shifts from first-person narration into journal form, more directly touches on issues plaguing the sensitive and tongue-tied narrator: heartsickness, creative block, and self-doubt. In so doing, Maddox has plenty of chances to poke fun at everything from self-important young New Yorkers, who carry their vanities from one chic bar to the next, to the catastrophic conceits churned out by hack writers everywhere. (Here is the description of a book by an acquaintance of the narrator: “Gordon Gunderson’s Black Current, which I dipped into today, is more than 1,200 pages in length and tells the story, according to its back cover, of a freak, once-in-a-millennium river swelling several years ago that resulted in the deaths of eight weekend canoeists in the Pacific Northwest.”) An imagined conversation between Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol about the nature of genius is classic Spy material. But while Maddox sometimes pushes dangerously close to the edge of the satirical envelope, My Little Blue Dress proves to be a warm-hearted look at the trickier turns of life -- and not just a clever idea run amok. (Jonathan Cook)

bn.com

...Spy veteren Bruno Maddox...send[s] up the "fictionalized biography" subgenre in his hilarious, long-awaited first novel...

Book Forum

My Little Blue Dress is rife with hilarious anachronisms and provides a delightfully wry antidote to too much Jane Austen.

Baltimore Sun

...an extravagantly silly, anachronism-filled parody of one of those precious "rural-childhood" memoirs...

Salon.com

In his first novel, Maddox, a former Spy magazine editor, concocts a hilariously off-the-wall satire of the memoir. The book tells the story of a young man, coincidentally named Bruno Maddox, who's taken it upon himself to recount the life story of an unnamed woman who was born on January 1, 1900. The brilliantly funny spoof begins as a classic chronicle of a long life, flush with the standard 20th-century memoir elements of war-torn England, 1920s Paris and suburban 1950s America. Bruno succeeds in presenting a merry little memoir (though he does include a few telling details that indicate that he is fabricating much of the woman's life): his unnamed protagonist discovers that she's prettier and more articulate than the other girls in her English village, moves to Paris (where she snorts cocaine with Henry Miller) and becomes a tea server at a military research facility during WWII. At this point, though, Bruno, who's crazily racing to finish the book, abruptly changes format and flashes forward to the end of her life. Now she's a decrepit old woman living in New York's Chinatown, composing a diary full of anecdotes of her glorious past and her caretaker is none other than a lovesick, aspiring writer named Bruno Maddox. Maddox's writing is purposely uppity, but the kitschy, honest overtones communicate a very witty take on love and life. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Imagine a situation in which a man is forced to write the memoir of a 100-year-old woman under extremely rushed circumstances, and you have the opening premise of this self-consciously postmodern novel. The first few chapters are amusingly filled with silly anachronisms, and the "author's" attitudes about her breasts and casual sex serve as wry commentary on the differences between the sexes. Unfortunately, this chronological narrative is abandoned, and the novel turns into the dismal diary of the elderly woman, dying in an apartment in New York City and being cared for by a young man named surprise! Bruno Maddox. Eventually, even this story line is stripped away as Bruno the narrator takes over in his desperate pursuit of girlfriend Hayley. However contrived it sounds, the unpolished, fake-memoir idea is really quite ingenious, allowing awkward sentences, typos, and ignorance of historical fact to become integral to the novel's structure. Among Bruno's ramblings are some entertaining asides on irony in modern fashion and urban life. Maddox is a former editor of SPY Magazine, and his bio makes interesting reading more so than parts of his book. For comprehensive modern fiction collections. Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This lively and ingenious first novel by the former editor of Spy juxtaposes two very different stories: the history, told by "herself," of a lusty young woman born on the first day of the last century, and the checkered love life and paraliterary career of "Bruno Maddox," who's writing the former tale at breakneck speed (and quite ineptly) to fulfill an unwisely entered contractual agreement. The metafictional stuff is frazzled and fragmented (though its cheerfully pessimistic tone is perversely enjoyable)—especially when compared with the unnamed fictional heroine's progress, from her childhood in a rustic backwater (whose inhabitants speak a riotously unintelligible dialect) through affairs with lovers of both sexes, various misadventures in Europe and America, and the eventual uniting of her fate with her creator's. The story is a mischievous updating of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg's semi-immortal jeu Candy, among other things (you might call it a parody of Nabokov parodying erotic commercial fiction). It does go on a bit too long, but it's a hoot all the same. Author tour

Kirkus Reviews