So Beautiful

By Ramona Dearing

In her first book Ramona Dearing has shown us her ability to almost effortlessly touch the core of what matters. She is a funny and serious writer, a writer who asks all the right questions while... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0889842353
• ISBN13: 9780889842359
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Length: 163 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

An inspired take on decoy toothbrushes and leaky umbrellas

An uneasy bravado animates Ramona Dearing's chronicles of life's looniness and pain in So Beautiful, her first collection of stories. But even better than the uneasy bravado is the false bravado: the doubt, the denial, the paranoia. And sometimes the paranoia turns out not to be paranoia after all. Or it's only prudent to be paranoid. As Gore Vidal once so astutely put it, "A man without paranoia is a man not in full possession of the facts." As it is for men, so it is for women. It's true for countries too, as we've known forever and as we especially know now. And it's most certainly true for the narrator of "So Beautiful the Fireman Would Cry," a woman who's been driven to practice paranoid strategies after Beanie, her roommate, confesses that she was so "provoked" by a former roommate that she used to twirl the offending girl's toothbrush in the toilet bowl twice a day. Our narrator is (understandably) so upset on hearing this that she pokes a decoy toothbrush into the toothbrush holder in their bathroom, then rolls her real toothbrush in Saran Wrap and hides it under her pillow. Occasionally, too, she checks the decoy toothbrush to see if it's damp. But this makes her feel the need to scrub her hands at least four times in succession to get rid of whatever germs she might have picked up by touching it. She also tries to make friends with the unstable Beanie, but when they take a boat over to Bowen Island to hike in the rain forest the narrator sees it as being so alive it's "almost choking itself" (a vivid metaphor for the suicidal Beanie). A sign that says LABYRINTH then leads them along a trail into a woodland sanctuary where all the white cherubs and gnomes lining the path look spooky and "extra white against all the dank and the green." But Beanie loves the labyrinth. "We are adventuring, and I moved here exactly because deep inside I am an adventuring babe." In other words she isn't merely a suicidal person, she's an irritating suicidal person, and when it begins to rain, making the greenery act like "a leaky umbrella," the narrator can't help wishing she could be here "with a real friend, not just a circumstantial one." In "Little Spanks" a woman who's part of a love triangle paints triangular icebergs for the tourists. "Greenish white, streaked with purple, big orange splotches for the puffins' feet." And in "Guilione's Zipper," Jill doesn't mean "to be so brazen on the bus home," it just happens. She also doesn't mean to lock shoulders with the man next to her. Or lightly stroke his nearest thigh. But at the same time she wants to feel the shininess of his bald head "lolling under her arms, under her breasts..." Dearing then hilariously explores Jill's rationalizations for why she's scared him off in what to me is the best sequence of all in this fetching book: "Surely he'd not been oblivious to the whole thing; after all, he did get up and move forward to an empty seat a couple of rows up. Maybe he was thinking of his wif