THERE IS NO FAIR COUNTRY: Bonnie Parker's Diary
In January of 1928 - two years before she met Clyde Barrow - a seventeen-year-old Dallas waitress named Bonnie Parker started a diary. A few pages in, the entries stop, because, she complained, nothing ever happened to her.
This novel begins in that silence.
There Is No Fair Country imagines the diary Bonnie kept when everything finally did - the private record behind the most famous outlaw love story in American history. It follows her from the caf counter to the boy who looked at her like a compass finding north; to the Waco jail door with a smuggled pistol under her dress; through a bank book of poems written in a Kaufman cell; thirteen days of playing house above a Joplin garage - and then out onto the road with Clyde, where the lawmen start dying, a police camera develops a roll of film, and the newspapers invent a cigar-smoking gun moll wearing her name.
The papers had their Bonnie and Clyde. This book is the story she kept for herself: the letters she performed for the prison censors, the stanzas she cut for being too true, the boy she taught multiplication in a stolen car, the rabbit she bought her mother for Easter, and the last ordinary afternoon in the Louisiana pines - bologna and crackers, a fish fry planned for Sunday - four days before the ambush at Gibsland ends it the only way she has quit pretending it won't.
Bonnie Parker became the most-read poetess of 1934. The world that finally read her did it to build the case for shooting her. This is the story of the difference between being remembered and being known - told in the one place she never had to perform.
Includes Bonnie Parker's real, complete poem "The Trail's End" - the ballad of Bonnie and Clyde that predicted their ending in every particular. Her actual voice, waiting at the back of the invented one.
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