Maria Flook

Not for the faint-hearted, Maria Flook’s memoir, First Person Female, tells a novelist’s life through a novelist’s loves, betrayals, affairs and one-night stands, presenting a determinedly female point of view, and fighting proudly to be seen for who she is in a world of famous men.

A longtime affair with an editor provides a recurring thread to hold the story together. Meanwhile short chapters are threaded like beads, each forming its own enticing essay on topics as varied as show more Gauguin’s “falsehood of truth” or the unyielding reality of a son’s cancer diagnosis. Cool analogies, absorbing metaphors, and a wealth of literary name-dropping and quotes, all surround nuggets of wisdom for writers, advice for success-seekers, and incautious glimpses through the closed bedroom doors of motels, hotels and homes.

In the end, the woman who stands first, whose person comes first, and whose femininity is so fiercely prominent, reveals herself as a mother who cares and a woman whose honest relationships matter more than the lies she’s contrived, the grafts of childhood finally laid to rest in the host of motherhood.

Disclosure: I was given a preview edition by the publisher and I offer my honest review. show less

August 15, 2003
Invisible Eden: Murder on Cape Cod
Maria Flook

The murder of Christa Worthington, a well-born fashion writer who was found murdered in her Cape Cod house, with her daughter beside her. Authorities still don’t know who killed her. Very well done. Flook is a little too in love with her own writing, reveling in all the unusual words and turns of phrase she uses, but all the detail is great. She didn’t glamorize Worthington too much, which is honest because you really can’t show more help but despise her in a way. She was astonishingly selfish, both before and after she had the kid. What a disaster with men, too. She didn’t seem a likable person at all, and there’s a part of me that says she reaped what she sowed. That’s probably unfair, but not entirely, I don’t think. I wonder if they’ll ever arrest anyone.

(update: they did arrest and convict someone a few years later - no one anyone had even suspected. A plumber or workman of some kind, not connected to her at all) show less

This was such a good book. I struggled to put it down. How the lives of these two sisters intertwined was amazing. The very first few chapters were a little slow, but I was glad that I stuck through those as the journey the author took me on was well worth it. Sad story, but gripping.

Smart, sexy, occasionally in your face. This is a strong collection by a writer who doesn't write a lot of poetry.