Hungry Hill: A Memoir, by Carole O’Malley Gaunt

Hungry Hill: A Memoir, by Carole O’Malley Gaunt. University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.

Carole O’Malley Gaunt is quite obviously Irish, and center stage of her memoir is her alcoholic father. How much more does one need to know to slot it into the genre of memoirs that detail the ills the Irish child suffers at the hands of his or her drunken parent? Think the McCourts, for one. It seems that her publisher and her publicist are aiming at that audience. Here’s the back flap copy they’ve written to entice readers:

“The author recounts her sad and turbulent story with remarkable clarity, humor, and insight, punctuating the narrative with occasional fictional scenes that allow the adult Carole to comment on her teenage experiences and to probe the impact of her mother’s death and her father’s alcoholism.”

Just makes you want to run right out and buy the book, doesn’t it. If you said, no, then you would be missing something, because the deathly prose in Hungry Hill is confined to the jacket copy. O’Malley Gaunt herself is a talented writer whose way with words and faculty for specific details makes this story of her teenage years come alive as only the best of memoirists have the wherewithal to achieve.

I am not Irish and my parents were merely social drinkers, but I grew up in roughly the same era as O’Malley Gaunt details here, and I can tell you: she’s got it down, right to the penny loafers and the headbands. Time and again, she transported me back to that time and that place. Here’s Carole on a double date:

“…Richie leans over, looks at Gordie, and lifts his eyebrows, a signal if I ever saw one. When Gordie puts thirty cents down for their cokes, Kathy pulls out her wallet from her straw bag while I reach into the pocket of my Bermuda shorts for the exact change. Because Gordie and Richie do not fork money up for our sodas, my neck relaxes a little….Out on the street, a blast of hot air hits us as if the July heat had been waiting for a Friday night meltdown. As we walk up the street, Richie and Gordie talk about cars—engines, headlights, and prices, but I can’t tell one car from another and have only just learned what a tailfin is….In the middle of Newbury Street, while talking about the pits in chrome fenders, Gordie reaches for my hand. It’s not as if he’s going to lift my hand with its short fingernails to his lips and kiss it, after all this is Springfield, not Paree. But still I don’t like it.”

I was on that double date, only mine was in Pittsburgh and we had just come from Gammon’ s and what made me uncomfortable was the boys hooting and hollering at a sign in the butcher’s window: Breasts, 79 cents. But the straw bag, the Bermuda shorts, the endless talk about cars and such that we all listened to with such feigned admiration—she’s nailed it.

But if you’re not looking for a trip down memory lane, there are those other reasons to read this book. It has something to do with the fact that her mother died early and her father was a handsome alcoholic and she was the only girl with six brothers. But at heart, Hungry Hill is really a coming of age story. The specifics of her life are less important than watching her make her way through the landmines that are always waiting for young girls growing up. This is not to minimize the impact that her father’s drinking had on her, but really, it is more important to her now, probably. There is about those fictional scenes with the adult Carole and the parental figure who wronged her a Twelve Step patina that rings false with the intense truthfulness of O’Malley Gaunt’s written memories of the time.

Hungry Hill is, despite the jacket copy, not a “sad and turbulent story.” Far from it. It is a counter to the bloated tales we're getting of the good old days of the Sixties and Seventies, stories of the movers and shakers, as it were, by the movers and shakers of today. This, on the other hand, is just a book about a girl in a time and a place; it’s a window into Growing Up Girl then—and I suspect—now as well. And it captures the era far better than all the retrospectives in the glossy weeklies have done.

Why Barack Obama Does Not Get My Vote

No I’m not jumping on the bandwagon, for a number of reasons:

1. I’m not a bandwagon jumper. I have, in fact, something of an antipathy to bandwagons. But I’m aware of that and thus when a bandwagon approaches, I try to be very clear on where my reasoning is sound and where it is not.

2. I have a visceral feeling, call it an urge actually, that his campaign intentions will come to naught, and he will leave our country worse off than it is. The last time I felt this way was in 2000. I felt sure that George W Bush would spell disaster for the United States. It was just such a visceral feeling, a knowing in my bones, as I have now, and I feel helpless again to be able to do anything to prevent my fellow countrymen from slipping down that slope again. Oh, and the time before that that I had it: when Richard Nixon got the presidency.

3. What is that slope? It’s the Feel Good Hill. We so want to feel good about ourselves that we throw our arms around the candidate that is most able to make us feel good. That’s what it was all about in ’00 when masses voted for George W. because he was just one of us, a regular guy that you’d want to knock back a couple of brews with. Never mind that he was not a regular guy, but a scion of the oligarchy whose candidacy, as was his bio, had been fashioned from the whole cloth. And in ’04, Dean was the Pied Piper, until he screamed. The ability to make us feel good is not a criteria that the concept of an informed electorate includes. Our democracy was created with the assumption that we, the people, would use our native intelligence and common education to make choices based on reason, not emotion.

4. Obama’s candidacy is almost as engineered as Bush’s was. The Presidential whispers started back at the last nominating convention when he gave that stirring speech. The whispers had little to do with his experience, because at that point (and still), he’d had little. No, the whispers had to do with the fact that he is an excellent orator. He could bring people together, urge them on, make them feel good. And God knows, the Democratic party needed that, so the powers that be, or the powers that wanna be, revved up their engines and here we are today with a candidate about whom the strongest thing people can say is that “he’ll bring us together.”

5. To do what, I want to know? True, he may increase the number of registered Democrats, but after election day, then what? How exactly will that translate to national and international policy? How will his “bringing us together” impact on his ability to make the hard decisions that are the fact of governing?

6. I’m appalled by the nostalgia that is fomenting Obama’s campaign. I want to say to all the people that think Camelot-Redux is just around the corner: How many of you were actually there then? How many of you are doing more than yearning after newsreel highlights and reconstituted memories? I was there then. The Bay of Pigs was no Hallmark moment, no matter how gloriously it’s portrayed today. It was a scary time and the fact that John F. Kennedy was a seasoned legislator who had actually been to war is probably what made all the difference. I would argue that for all Barack Obama is a good man of integrity and intelligence, he hasn’t the experience and therefore the ability to lead our country in the international arena where we are so very, very vulnerable.

Please, please, please, people: put your hearts aside and use your heads. Obama may make you feel good; Clinton will make you safe.

Lost in the Sixties

YouTube - Del Shannon - Runaway (1965)

I hear this song and I'm in the back seat of a car, at the tail end of a double date. We're on our way to the Greater Pittsburgh Airport, just to walk around, hang out, see whatever there was to see. I don't remember who my date was. No one important, then or later. It's winter, cold, and was it really raining or is it that song puts rain into my mind? I don't know. Memory is a funny thing, isn't it. The boy I'm wondering about has dumped me, that I know. Alan. My first short blond. My first kiss. My first makeout. My first breakup.

CUT -- This is just not working. I'm trying to get myself back in the moment to write an amazingly evocative trip back in time and it simply isn't happening. Sorta like the orgasm that just won't roll over...or the sneeze that dies before it's out.

Part of it, I know, is the the bevy of prancing girls circling Del Shannon. Are they doing The Pony? Or just making like a carousel. And if so, to what end? And isn't their hair bouncy? As if they're refugees from a Breck commercial.

That's what we looked like in the Sixties. Exactly. Friends today see the photos of me back then and gush, "You were so good-looking. The boys must have just loved you." Well, no, they didn't. The boys loved the blondes; we brunettes were always consigned to the second banana role. Think Betty and Veronica. Or Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner.

Besides, I was too "ethnic". Read, Jewish. Not WASP. The Other.

And also, too smart. Smart was not in then. Smart came about five years later.

I always was ahead of my time...