Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, by Florence King

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ayalesca lent this book to me. Thanks Aya!

Ignore the stupid pink cover, this is actually a great, substantive book that gets straight to the heart of overheated Southern puritanism, and to the process by which girls (specifically Southern girls of a certain era, but still partially true of girls in other times and places) are socialized.

The main reason to read this book is that it is very funny, and also impressively forthrightly sexual. The author wrote romance and erotica under a pen name, so this perhaps explains it. XD;;; Florence King has since become a conservative columnist, which is a shame.

R also liked the book, but was disturbed by the second half. She said: the author's parents seem to have been genuinely decent people, so why does the author fail to have empathy for people who don't capture her imagination? She wasn't like this as a kid: she recognized that her background was unusual and felt bad when she used people for her own ends. When did the sensitivity die?

(Answer: When her dream of translating French for a living died in University. This was coincidentally also when her dream of having an unassailable feminimity (because there's nothing more feminine than French) died.)

(R again: I thought the title of this book was a joke, but maybe she was actually serious??)

Anyway. Good book. Author shouldn't worry so much about not being a lady, since she does appear to have taken after her grandma (the family elitist), after all.

EDIT: I think the problem specifically is that King loathes and looks down on everyone who isn't as intellectually sharp as she is, but never acknowledges that everyone else didn't have a 24-hour live-in tutor (her father, who is self-taught the way Ben Franklin is self-taught). She not only does NOT give her father the credit he is due, she also adopts her grandmother's sense of superiority, though she is more fair about it (King loathes all of humanity equally).

I honestly think... not to try to "fix" her personality too much, because obviously it's been working for her, and anyway anyone who tries to tell her that she should have more empathy for others can be accused of being a soft-headed huggy bear - but I honestly think that if she could have acknowledged the huge advantage she got from being her father's daughter, she could have found room in her heart to understand the intellectual failings of others.

Still, she might not have turned out quite so misanthropic if the forces of the world (growing up poor, and a girl, in the South) hadn't been aligned against her. I mean it must be infuriating to be told that you have an advantage over others when you have been denied everything you really want for your entire life.

/psychoanalysis

Comments

[ex_ayalesca554]

Actually my impression is that she hates everyone equally, but people who are ~interesting~ are at least worth writing up, as opposed to ignoring. It's not like she doesn't appreciate that other people exist and work hard and whatever, it's just that she doesn't bother thinking about them (and doesn't care if they bother to think of her).

Why is it so terrible that she is a conservative columnist XD; I have read some of her clippings and I think they're just on the right side of cynical. I think she just doesn't like meddling with other people's business (although mocking them is okay -- but mockery is not partisan!), which sort of automatically throws her into the conservative camp.

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Yeah, that's what it said on her wikipedia page, too. R's argument was that she was more open when she was younger. Maybe it's just that when you're younger, you can't immediately figure out which stereotype non-eccentrics fall into and dismiss them from your thoughts, because you haven't learned the stereotypes yet.

As written, both of her parents really did seem like fundamentally very decent people, though. On the other hand, no matter how many jokes Florence King made about her, I just couldn't like the grandmother.

Hmmm, well I guess being a conservative columnist does allow her to be caustic. Actually I read some of the columns, and they seemed more observational than anything, though they sometimes did that sarcastic conservative thing where you don't bother to explain why something is actually bad.