“Lost River, Vermont. August 2019. It is Sunday morning, early. Sasha is still out on the sun porch daybed where she has been sleeping all summer, but I’ve been up since my phone started buzzing at six a.m. with text after text from Gilly. CALL ME. Gilly should not be awake this early on a Sunday. Sundays in the city are for sleeping until noon.”
I’m Betty Martin with "Martin’s Must Reads" and those are the opening lines to T. Greenwood’s novel Such a Pretty Girl. The speaker of the quote is fifty year old Ryan Flanningan. Gilly has been her best friend ever since his family started spending their summers in Lost River while their father took part in the summer theater.
In the 70’s when Ryan was eleven, her mother Fiona, a wannabe actress, moved them to the Westbeth Artists’ Housing in New York City in hopes of being discovered. But it’s Ryan that’s discovered by a modeling agency and her fame takes off after posing for a Loves Baby Soft ad.
The 2019 Sunday call was concerning a dirty little secret of Fiona’s that had just appeared in the newspaper. And because of that secret, Henri, a talented photographer, resident of the Westbeth and Ryan’s protector had committed suicide. His funeral is the only thing that would bring Ryan back to NY and would make these childhood memories resurface.
The author wrote about her novel, “I wanted to examine how ambition can tilt one’s moral compass. I wanted to write about a period in history when women were simultaneously fighting for equal rights and still being exploited and commodified.”
If you’re interested in reading a novel during the time of child actors, Brooke Shields and Tatum O’Neal, then you must read Such a Pretty Girl by T. Greenwood.
