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Dame Hilary Mantel |
I urge you to get Hilary Mantel's new collection of short stories:
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. I consider Ms Mantel along with Julian Barnes to be the greatest living writers. It's not political despite the provocative title and I say that as someone who greatly admired Margaret Thatcher and very highly recommend her two memoirs.
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I borrowed The Assassination audiobook from the library which has the superb narration of Jane Carr |
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The Iron Lady |
You can even sample Ms Mantel's short story of the title
here for free. It's about a 20-30 minute read well worth your time and will demonstrate her virtuosity.
Today is my
Estella's birthday. This year isn't nearly as fraught as last year which was a milestone for us both. By the way, I wasn't the one who first referred to her as 'Estella' as it was one of her friends upon learning our back story. Estella positively tingled with delight at having such a famous literary antecedent and I did bristle a little as our early years weren't quite like that as little GSL was a schoolyard Napoleon but every time I was tossing and goring a schoolmate...or more often a member of the faculty, the one surefire rejoinder was with a paralyzing 'Estella' reference. It seems during the great blizzard of 1980, a dashing young man walked over 2 miles through 14 inches of snow upon being summoned by "
the Havisham girl" and a golf course grounds crewman out with a front end loader gave him up.
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My Estella has this same pert manner. |
Estella has butchered every idiom in the English language but has every
Scarlett O'Hara scene down cold and wouldn't need
Mammy tugging too tightly on that corset either as she has maintained her girlish figure. We go back nearly 40 years and I did take her to our prom and we were often thought to be a 'couple' and a man at our club always told her '
Pip' would "one day own General Motors" which sounded rather grand in 1980. I'll never forget the horror on my mother's face when I broke the news her almost 42 year old son had joined the Army and was reporting to boot camp in 3 days. The stark terror was quickly followed by: "
What does Estella think about all this?!?!" which caught me by surprise since my mother of course knew Estella was married. One longtime friend of her parents, and a big fan of her
Pip, as dementia started to take hold always mistook the name of Estella's husband. Each time when informed of the mistake, he didn't take the news well.
No, she wasn't born on a Friday....and I did check that early on.
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Estella with her Ripley when they lived in Wales. |
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Estella circa 2004 |
Happy Birthday Estella!