"Fleet of New Bedford" by Henry Zbyszynski
The novel I am currently working on is called "Walking Across the Atlantic" and is based on a short story that won the Robert Olen Butler Prize in 2007.
Wendy O'Hegarty is the daughter of the local Catholic priest and the single mother who owns a hair salon, the Mane Attraction, across from the docks in the old fishing port of New Bedford, Massachusetts. As a child, she longs to have a photograph taken with her parents that could hang on the living room wall; when she asks her mother why they're not a happy family, her mother Jasmine says, "Only fools and cows are happy." Wendy wishes she had relatives but soon discovers that her Uncle Klary, from Money, Mississippi, is the murderer of the 14-year-old Emmett Till.
Wendy has tea with the French Resistance heroine Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, meets Sinclair Lewis' wife, talks to George Bernard Shaw in church and has a long conversation with Sigmund Freud the night her mother mysteriously disappears.
During America's civil rights struggles of 1964, her boyfriend is killed and Wendy is forced to come to terms not only with the person she is but with the heroine she dreams of becoming.
Wendy O'Hegarty is the daughter of the local Catholic priest and the single mother who owns a hair salon, the Mane Attraction, across from the docks in the old fishing port of New Bedford, Massachusetts. As a child, she longs to have a photograph taken with her parents that could hang on the living room wall; when she asks her mother why they're not a happy family, her mother Jasmine says, "Only fools and cows are happy." Wendy wishes she had relatives but soon discovers that her Uncle Klary, from Money, Mississippi, is the murderer of the 14-year-old Emmett Till.
Wendy has tea with the French Resistance heroine Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, meets Sinclair Lewis' wife, talks to George Bernard Shaw in church and has a long conversation with Sigmund Freud the night her mother mysteriously disappears.
During America's civil rights struggles of 1964, her boyfriend is killed and Wendy is forced to come to terms not only with the person she is but with the heroine she dreams of becoming.