With clear-eyed candor, this biography brings a family’s extraordinary matriarch to life.
Holden (Prince Valium, 1982) delves into his family’s secrets in a sweeping, novelistic biography spanning continents and generations.
Dolly Vardon, the author’s grandmother, was born in Victorian England in 1886 and was quickly abandoned to a life of poverty, raised by a foster mother in the London slums. Young Annie, renamed “Dolly” due to her small stature, earned pennies by dancing in the streets for wealthy men. Her life’s course altered when she captured the interest of Harry Sidney Nichols, a much older, well-established bookseller and publisher of Victorian erotica. He took teenage Dolly to decadent Paris as his ward and lover, showering her with luxuries she never knew before but also subjecting her to horrific abuse. Later, pregnant and desperate, Dolly followed him to booming New York City, where she eventually raised a family through two world wars and the Great Depression. Holden vividly recreates the cities of London, Paris and New York City through the decades, at one point vividly describing the moment when his grandmother crossed the threshold into America: “Country women weep, their kids stare wide-eyed, men cross themselves, kiss a Saint Christopher medal or murmur a prayer of thanksgiving….Dolly stares in silent awe at the mist-shrouded city rising before her.” Dolly’s tale is one of success and tragedy, and Holden’s biography honors the resilience of a young woman who rose out of the slums, charmed and bribed her way past customs officials on Ellis Island, and reinvented herself as a successful businesswoman. However, Holden refrains from casting his grandmother as a saint. Using testimonials from his mother—Dolly’s eldest child—he deftly illustrates how the tenacity and survival instincts that made Dolly such an indomitable figure ultimately, as she aged, became her undoing: “[S]he was fighting a war with an enemy that gnawed at the weapons she had depended upon for survival all her life.”
With clear-eyed candor, this biography brings a family’s extraordinary matriarch to life.Pub Date: June 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490457291
Page Count: 448
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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