Synopses & Reviews
The Seven O'Clock Syndrome
At least three evenings a week, and in a prime week every evening. Sometimes it's just the familiar walnut-at-the-base-of-the-tongue, accompanied by an eye-sheening wash of tears which I can usually hide behind the "National Observer" or the round dome of the cat's back. (He spends the seven o'clock news crouched on my chest, tail in my face--from this angle he is a perfect series of ellipses--blinking serenely at God knows what inklings and oddments of his own.)
But at other times, the tears catch me unaware, a flood tide that rises up through my throat, reddening my eyes and corrugating my face truly hideously, spilling out in a guttering runnel of Revlon, prompting me to strangle and snort and rush into the bedroom for a Kleenex and my husband to sigh. He isn't callous, only accustomed. This briny ritual is my evensong, as the brief, neck-crippling, head-on-chest nap before dinner ("I am not asleep, I am merely resting my eyes") is his.
It didn't start until a couple of years ago, this peculiar affliction of mine. Leaving the hermetically sealed dome of an Alabama college campus in the late fifties, I found the shining, murderous sixties a shattering enough experience, but it was with more or less normal bemusement and judicious, abstract outrage that I reacted. As a reporter for a city magazine during this decade, I found enough in my own back yard to mourn or decry, but somehow, it didn't unglue me. Some things came close; the fire storms of Selma and Cleveland, where my own friends in the news media stood to lose more than their cameras and tape recorders and half a nation stood to lose it all, wrung tears offright and frustration from me. But others wept then, too. Those were the years when a whole generation of placid young sheep learned how to howl like starveling wolves. And there was the anguished jungle lying just beyond the world I knew, that bloomed, mature and perfect and terrible, when the bullet that shattered John Kennedy's head also cracked the skin of my world to reveal it. And the snowballing horror of watching them go, one by one--Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. I cried then, furiously, blindly, for days--but so did everybody else. Almost.
Later in that decade, and into the next one, there were things that merited-and received-the cathartic ceremony of grief. Appalachia, Biafra, Vietnam, Bangladesh; ritual murder in California and bloodied, near-human seal pups in Alaska; the crippling of a man I feared and loathed, but whose life I affirmed, in a Maryland shopping center; earthquakes, fire, and the incredible, unspeakable image of a girl child half a world away, naked, arms outflung, running down a road in Vietnam. On fire.
Things, truly, to cry about. And sane people eating their dinners all over the world did.
This seven o'clock thing of mine is different.
It generally starts when our local news hits, at sixthirty. I've probably just come in from work and switched on the set in the den. First, the local big stuff: A member of the police aldermanic committee has been nailed for accepting a bribe from a creamy, smiling restaurateur and club owner who happens to live down the street from me. Two mayoral candidates are calling each other names. The sanitation workers' strike is waxing ripely into its second week. A black man in one of our yeastierghettos--slated for urban renewal nine years ago--has shot his common-law wife and her three young daughters. A local supermarket survey has shown that meat prices jumped 11 percent this past week. The Falcons have lost--again. It's going to rain-again. The smirking station ombudsman, the one with the Frankensteinlike hairpiece, whose task it is to preserve, protect, and defend the small consumer by publicly shaming his corporate malefactor, silkily announces that the Ed Fleag family of Sweet Harmony Drive, this city, is indeed going to get a refund on the chemical toilet that blew up their camper on the interstate last month. The appallingly young critic-at-large, who resembles a cadet Cuban pimp, blasts a visiting symphony conductor to shards and mispronounces "Moussorgsky."
Except for the murdered family, surely not the stuff of tears. Rage, maybe, but not tears. Never theless, they begin to nibble at my sinuses like demented mice.
Then the national news, and out come the big guns. John Chancellor, chanting like a Druid who knows a dirty joke, is telling us about Watergate. No inherent grief there, for me, anyway; I fiercely love every new morsel and can't wait for the whole suppurating mess to be laid out cleanly, like the seed mass of a rotting pumpkin spread on newspaper, so we can throw the damned thing away. But the traitorous muscles around my mouth quiver.
Mr. Kissinger has done a good day's work on the Middle East imbroglio; gallant, cliff-faced Mrs. Meir smiles her smile of lopsided grandeur. One sinus pings shut like a butterfly valve.
An oil slick from a wounded tanker has slimed a section of coast, but area conservationists and kids, working together, have managedto capture, clean, and save most of the affected sea birds ... close-up of saved sea bird. I whiffle, drawing an apprehensive glance from my husband, who had innocently thought tonight's news was the best we'd had in days.
David Brinkley says something so utterly sane, acid, and funny about the energy crisis that I wish I'd said it-or written it to my congressman. And a burping sob comes skittering up from behind my rib cage.
And then the news is over and the Hamm's Beer commercial comes on--the one with the shambling, trusting clown of a bear--and I am back scrabbling on my dressing table for a Kleenex.
Synopsis
Anne Rivers Siddons invites you into her home and her heartIn this collection of heartfelt and involving vignettes, Anne Rivers Siddons--the beloved bestselling author of Downtown, Hill Towns, and Colony--offers a stirring and insightful look at our everyday world and how one woman has chosen to live in it. Moving from memories of her gentle grandfather to her uncanny ability to attract stray animals, Siddons' intimate stories of her family are graced with the same poetic lilt and vibrant detail that have so wonderfully served her novels. For all those who know and love her works of fiction, John Chancellor Makes Me Cry is a glorious and thoroughly entertaining treat.
About the Author
Anne River Siddons was born in 1936 in Fairburn, Georgia, a small railroad town just south of Atlanta, where her family has lived for six generations. The only child of a prestigious Atlanta lawyer and his wife, Siddons was raised to be a perfect Southern belle. Growing up, she did what was expected of her: getting straight A's, becoming head cheerleader, the homecoming queen, and then Centennial Queen of Fairburn. At Auburn University she studied illustration, joined the Tri-Delt sorority, and "did the things I thought I should. I dated the right guys. I did the right activities," and wound up voted "Loveliest of the Plains."
During her student years at Auburn, the Civil Rights Movement first gained national attention, with the bus boycott in Montgomery and the integration of the University of Alabama. Siddons was a columnist for the Auburn Plainsman at the time, and she wrote, "an innocuous, almost sophomoric column" welcoming integration. The school's administration requested she pull it, and when she refused, they ran it with a disclaimer stating that the university did not share her views. Because she was writing from the deep South, her column gained instant national attention and caused quite "a fracas." When she wrote a second, similarly-minded piece, she was fired. It was her first taste of the power of the written word.
After graduation, she worked in the advertising department of a large bank, doing layout and design. But she soon discovered her real talents lay in writing, as she was frequently required to write copy for the advertisements. "At Auburn, and before that when I wrote local columns for the Fairburn paper, writing came so naturally that I didn't value it. I never even thought that it might be a livelihood, or a source of great satisfaction. Southern girls, remember, were taught to look for security."
She soon left the bank to join the staff of the recently founded Atlanta magazine. Started by renowned mentor, Jim Townsend, the Atlanta came to life in the 1960's, just as the city Atlanta was experiencing a rebirth. As one of the magazine's first senior editors, Siddons remembers the job as being, "one of the most electrifying things I have ever done in terms of sheer joy." Her work at the magazine brought her in direct contact with the Civil Rights Movement, often sitting with Dr. King's people at the then-black restaurant Carrousel, listening to the best jazz the city had to offer. At age 30, she married Heyward Siddons, eleven years her senior, and the father of four sons from a previous marriage.
Her writing career took its next leap when Larry Ashmead, then an editor at Doubleday, noticed an article of hers and wrote to her asking if she would consider doing a book. She assumed the letter was a prank, and that some of her friends had stolen Doubleday stationary. When she didn't respond, Ashmead tracked her down, and Siddons ended up with a two book contract: a collection of essays which became John Chancellor Makes Me Cry, and a novel of her college days, which became Heartbreak Hotel, and was later turned into a film, Heart of Dixie, starring Ally Sheedy.
As Ashmead moved on, from Doubleday to Simon &Shuster, then to Harper &Row, Siddons followed, writing a horror story, The House Next Door, which Stephen King described as a prime example of "the new American Gothic," and then Fox's Earth and Homeplace, about the loss of a beloved home.
It was in 1988, with the publication of her fifth book, the best-selling Peachtree Road, that Siddons graduated to real commercial success. Described by her friend and peer, Pat Conroy, as "the Southern novel for our generation." With almost a million copies in print, Peachtree Road ushered Siddons onto the literary fast track. Since then the novels have been coming steadily, about one each year, with her readership and writer's fees increasing commensurately. In 1992 she received $3.25 million from HarperCollins for a three book deal, and then, in 1994, HarperCollins gave Siddons $13 million for a four book deal.
Now, she and her Heyward shuttle between a sprawling home in Brookhaven, Atlanta, and their summer home in Brooklin, Maine. She finds Down East, "such a relief after the old dark morass of the South. It's like getting a gulp of clean air...I always feel in Maine like I'm walking on the surface of the earth. In the South, I always feel like I'm knee-deep." But she still remains tied to her home in the South, where she does most of her writing. Each morning, Siddons dresses, puts on her makeup and then heads out to the backyard cottage that serves as her office. And each night, she and her husband edit the day's work by reading it aloud over evening cocktails.
Siddons' success has naturally brought comparisons with another great Southern writer, Margaret Mitchell, but Siddons insists that the South she writes about is not the romanticized version found in Gone With the Wind. Instead, her relationship with the South is loving, but realistic. "It's like an old marriage or a long marriage. The commitment is absolute, but the romance has long since worn off...I want to write about it as it really is: I don't want to romanticize it."