BOOK REVIEW: 'Letter to My Daughter' Resonates
Male Reviewer Thinks Women Will Enjoy Male's Debut Novel
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
Theoretically at least, I should be as unqualified to review a book about mother-daughter relationships as George Bishop was to write one, "Letter to My Daughter" (Ballantine Books, 160 pages, $20.00).
I have no daughter and neither does Bishop. I'm a guy and so is Bishop, so where does he get off writing about a mother and her daughter, who goes missing -- and what kind of nerve do I have reviewing it? As I write this, they've discovered the body of 17-year-old honor student and athlete Chelsea King in northern San Diego County, who went missing after a solo run. I can only imagine the grief her parents are going through.
Imagination is what fiction -- good fiction like George Bishop's debut novel -- is all about. Anybody can write about what they know firsthand; it takes imagination of a superior kind to put yourself into a different gender and push the imagination button.
Count Leo Tolstoy demonstrated a wonderful understanding of women in both "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace." So did Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in plays like "Hedda Gabler" and "A Doll's House" and French novelist Gustave Flaubert in "Madam Bovary." Similarly, Agatha Christie and other women writers created wonderful male characters. To pick just one contemporary writer, think about English novelist Ruth Rendell's fully realized Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. Joyce Carol Oates' characters -- male and female alike -- are wonderfully drawn.
As the novel opens, Laura tries to calm herself by writing a letter to her missing 15-year-old daughter Elizabeth, who stormed out of their Baton Rouge, Louisiana home after an argument. Laura writes, not knowing if and when Elizabeth will return: "Think of my letter as my birthday present to you. Something which my mother never told me, but which I'll endeavor now with all my heart to tell you: the truth about how a girl grows up. The truth about life."
Laura writes about growing up in a small town in Louisiana and falling in love with a poor Cajun boy who doesn't meet the rigid requirements of a proper boyfriend to Laura's upwardly mobile parents. Laura persists in the relationship and for her efforts is shipped off to a Catholic girls school in Baton Rouge. It's really the female equivalent of a military academy, the kind where "problem" boys are sent to after everything else fails.
In the letter to her daughter, Laura unburdens herself, telling about things that she never revealed before. She obviously doesn't want to become her own uncommunicative mother -- an all-to-often "inevitable" result.
So, if you're a woman, or a man, looking for insights into parenting by a man who isn't a parent, pick up "Letter to My Daughter." You'll be charmed by Bishop's writing.
About the Author:
George Bishop holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He's an actor and a world traveler, having lived ant taught in Slovakia, Turkey, India, Azerbaijan, India and Japan. His writing has appeared in The Oxford American, The Third Coast Press and American Writing. He lives in New Orleans.