Synopses & Reviews
A rakish bachelor and his introspective daughter survive the 70s California style.
The Family Ruin, as described by the precocious young Inez Ruin, is a complex one. Her father, Paul, is selfobsessed, intrusive, opinionated, and profligate. He's also brilliant, adoring, magnetic, and liberating. Unable and unwilling to sustain a monogamous relationship, he's divorced from Inez's mother, Connie, and claims that he will never marry again, since "marriage is a bad deal for everyone particularly women." His intriguing personality and movie-star good looks mean that he's never alone, and many varied female identities are paraded before Inez in the form of a never-ending string of girlfriends that her father loves and then leaves.
Inez swings between two worlds one represented by her mother, Connie, an ex-star flamenco dancer, and Connie's mother, Abuelita, a Peruvian immigrant whoworks devotedly as a housekeeper for a recording-industry executive, and the other by Paul's motherold-money Grandmother Ruin, who invites Inez for horse-riding outings and tea parties that are really lessons in refinement. Bouncing between an innocent, secure life with Connie and Abuelita, and premature, though thrilling, exposures to an ultrasophisticated and unregulated life during her visits to her father in San Francisco, Inez attempts to find a reality that is somewhere in the middle.
As Inez progresses through high school, we are witness along with her to the preoccupations of Californians of the age: drugs, sex, art, surfing, love beads, Nixon, motorcycles, and the goal of not making a big deal out of anything. Inez encounters them all in her climb toward maturity, culminating in a trip to Hawaii that becomes a perilous slide into drugged oblivion. She makes it out in time, but her beloved half brother doesn't and her ascension to adulthood occurs in the task of rescuing him.
Martha Sherrill's ability to reconstruct time and place in absolute pitch-perfect detail allows for a remarkable rendering of an exhilarating and confusing decade of American life.
Review
"It's not a memoir, but it very much has that feel." Portland Oregonian
Review
"One of Sherrill's strengths as a novelist is how she makes use of all these very disparate and racially diverse characters as metaphors for the reality of life in California." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Californians in their 40s, in particular, will be knocked out by nostalgia." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Sherrill's re-creation of California in the '70s is impeccable, and her story of how a girl trapped in a theatrical family manages to transform herself from an observer into the star of her own life is absolutely irresistible." Booklist
Synopsis
As Inez progresses through high school, readers are witness to the preoccupations of Californians of the 1970s: drugs, sex, art, surfing, love beads, Nixon, motorcycles, and the goal of not making a big deal out of anything.
Synopsis
For the Ruin family in 1970s California, as described by the precocious young Inez, life is complex. Her father, Paul, is self-obsessed, intrusive, and brilliant. He's also twice divorced, leaving Inez to bounce between two worlds and embracing neither-that of Paul's bohemian life in San Francisco and the more sedate world of her mother Connie, a Latin bombshell who plays tennis and attends EST seminars in the suburbs. As Inez progresses through high school we are witness to a remarkable family saga that renders a strange and fascinating slice of America in transition-one like the Ruins of California themselves, at once bold and innocent, creative and chaotic, obsessed and liberating.
About the Author
Sherrill has been a staff writer in the Style Section of The Washington Post since 1989, covering politics and the arts.