MAD LIT
Issue #32
JENNIFER BELLE
By Ling Ma
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
“There are only so many things you can count on in this world,” declares Rebekah Kettle, the protagonist of Jennifer Belle’s third novel, Little Stalker. “I know that every winter I can find a great vintage coat and that every spring it will fall apart. I know every summer I can get perfectly sliced watermelon strips — that taste faintly of cigarettes — jammed into round plastic containers at the Korean market.”
There are only so many good novels about single women living the big-city life, and Jennifer Belle’s novels are among the best, the most human and genuine. Her first-person narrators are solitary female flaneurs in continual drift through the pretty and gruesome parts of New York, and it’s always a treat to be in on their streaming monologues as they attend movie matinees alone, proclaim their particularities about lobsters and sensitive backs, deride pedestrians, and generally inflict their humanity on an otherwise indifferent world.
For our Mad Lit questionnaire, Belle proclaims her particularities on commercially successful, critically underestimated Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann.
1. The book I choose is:Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann by Barbara Seaman.
2. In one sentence, this book is about: an incredible woman, an unbelievable career, and the greatest marriage of all time.
3. I chose this title because: it’s my biggest secret. I always read it when I have a new book coming out. It taught me everything I know about publicity and marketing. We can all learn from Jackie.
4. The first time I read it, I was: in upstate New York with the man who later became my husband on our first weekend away together. He bought it for me, without its cover, in a used bookstore in Saugerties and he said, “We’d probably get married,” even though we’d been dating about a month.
Later he got very drunk and I got uptight about driving with him and we had a big fight when he came slobbering toward me expecting to have sex and started talking about some redheaded girl he had liked at camp.
I started the book sitting on the floor on the white wall-to-wall carpeting of his friend Sheldon’s not-exactly-quaint country house in High Falls, and I thought maybe he could be my Irving Mansfield (Jackie’s husband), an idea my shrink later called a delusional fantasy.
5. I’ve read it: three times. Once for each of my three books.
6. One free-associative personal memory I have of this book is: the look on people’s faces when I give them this book as my most heartfelt and solemn gift to them and explain that it’s one of my all-time favorite books.
7. My favorite part is: the quotes at the beginning of every chapter, like this one from Irving Mansfield: “I hear all those fellas are scared. I mean, having their books published in the same season with a new Jackie Susann. John Cheever on the Mike Wallace show… You know Cheever any chance? Bullet Park’s his latest. Well, he said it was murder, plain murder, coming out the same time against a Jackie Susann. I suppose Nabokov feels the same way.”
8. If I ever met the author, I would: sidle up next to her at the bar wearing my own vintage Pucci and clink martini glasses with her — and Jean Rhys, and Janet Hobhouse, and Jane Austen, and Sylvia Plath, and all the other dead writers up there with me — and my suspicions would be confirmed that all writers get to hang out together and drink martinis after we’re dead.
9. After reading it, this book caused me to: hire a publicist, be nice to the people who work at Barnes and Noble, never complain on a book tour, buy as many copies of my own book as possible and hand them out like cigarettes, marry my husband.
10. One unresolved question I wondered about was: why she thought the book about her dog — Every Night, Josephine! — was a good idea. If I wrote a book called Every Night, Sammy!, even without the exclamation point, I’d never be able to pull it off.
11. Music to listen to when reading this: “These Boots Were Made For Walking” by Nancy Sinatra; “Downtown” by Petula Clark; and “Both Sides Now” by Judy Collins.
12. You should read it when: you’ve written a book or you want to write a book or you want to be in the company of a great broad.
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