TRIPPING From Cleveland to Paris & Beyond

by Hermine Fuerst

Overview

TRIPPING is the story of Barbara Glass, an American misfit from the Silent Generation who, after a heartbreaking loss, decides to say "Goodbye Cleveland... Bonjour Paris!" She embarks on a voyage of self-discovery, and the result is a fascinating series of adventures and misadventures. From 1957 to 1967 our heroine, nicknamed Bear, "trips" from Cleveland to New York, London, Paris, Siena and Algiers. Along the way she encounters history-making events and people, both ordinary and extraordinary, who shape her life. Death, both peaceful and violent, punctuates her experiences and brings hard-earned wisdom. The title of the book says it all -- tripping as in stumbling (but trying not to fall), tripping as in drugs (supposed to be harmless but actually lethal), and tripping as in travelling all over the place and enjoying every minute of it. You'll want to read this book if you are a student of French language or history. Crazy about Paris or just dreaming about it? Interested in the Silent Generation? You'll find lots to chew on in this book. Interested in women's issues? TRIPPING explores many of them -- including self-discovery, abortion, amphetamine addiction, gaining assurance in a man's world, the elusive female orgasm, etc. -- which remain controversial even today. There's also a whodunit aspect to TRIPPING when the mystery of the death of one of the protagonists is finally explained at the end of the book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780615617459
Publisher:	Dolmen Books
Publication date:	06/11/2012
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

After graduating from Heights High in 1952, Hermine Fuerst attended what was then Flora Stone Mather College at Case Western Reserve University, receiving a BA in French Literature in 1956. A stint in New York as a production assistant at NBC Television gave her the necessary funds to achieve her dream, and she arrived in France in late 1957. Once there, a tip from a friend landed her what was supposed to be a temporary job as secretary to Alain Bernheim, a Franco-American literary agent. She ended up working with Bernheim for thirteen years, following which she became head of the literary department of the William Morris Agency in Paris.

Her career as an agent was followed by marriage and a family, punctuated by numerous writing assignments. Besides magazine articles and an opera libretto, she wrote the English adaptation of dozens of French film scripts. She is a member of the French Authors Guild (SACD) and co-author of a series of language courses. Currently she divides her time between her two residences, one in Southern California and the other in the French countryside.

Editorial Reviews

A young woman's search for purpose and identity takes her from her stifling, humdrum home in 1950s Cleveland to exhilarating Paris, where anything seems possible, in this novel cum travelogue by French-American expat and literary agent Fuerst. When Barbara Glass graduates from Western Reserve in the late 1950s, there's just one thing on her mind: Paris. Unlike the rest of her female contemporaries content with trading in their books for secure secretarial jobs, Tupperware parties and wedding bands, Barbara bucks convention (and her controlling mother's interests) to embark on a solo adventure to France by boat, in the style of "la fuite en avant--escaping from something through forward movement." What starts out as a two-week stint turns into more than 10 years in la Ville-Lumières (the City of Lights), as she slowly transforms from country-bumpkin tourist to full-fledged Francophile. Through Barbara's increasingly enlightened and sophisticated eyes, readers will want to come along for the ride as Barbara "trips" from her first raucous Bastille Day celebration to the Palio horserace in Siena to an Edith Piaf concert at the famous Olympia concert hall to war-torn Algiers during Ramadan. Heartaches--her best friend's suicide following a bout of postpartum depression and amphetamine withdrawal, a thrilling but ill-advised one-night fling followed by a risky abortion, a long-term and inevitably terminal affair with a married man, her father's fatal heart attack--are sprinkled in for good measure, adding necessary depth and meaning to what could otherwise seem like a fluff piece about a privileged college girl's adventures and misadventures abroad. Told in first-person and including details similar to Fuerst's life (like her protagonist, Fuerst is from "the Mistake by the Lake" and spent more than 20 years living in Paris), it's hard not to imagine the book as a quasi-memoir, especially since the descriptions of smells, sounds and sights teem with such life and verve so as to suggest firsthand experience. As an added bonus, Fuerst balances out the narrative with three chapters that give a sociological overview of the Silent Generation (Barbara's generation and, presumably, the author's). While these interruptions initially seem out of place within the confines of the story, the topics covered provide interesting cultural references (wool bathing suits, the publication of the Kinsey Report, Levittown) and insights into a generation that is often overshadowed or misunderstood. Look beyond its misleading title; this potential sleeper hit has about as much to do with LSD as the French do with Cool Whip.

Kirkus Reviews