Those dancing feet

Gosh-damn, what do you write about on a Monday?

A Monday after a particularly choice grandmother weekend, making videos of old ads (for 7-year-old Caitlin loves watching vintage commercials for Chatty Cathy and Tiny Tears, then staging her own demented versions), plunging into cookie dough up to our elbows (or should I say "cookie DO", in keeping with the newly acceptable and even universal spelling of "donut"), and general chasing around. It was good, it was exhausting, they're home now, and I have the Mondays again.

But that's OK. Because there's always something to write about, isn't there?

If anybody follows this blog, they'll catch on to the fact that I like to probe the layers of my collection of old books like an archaelogical dig. Yellowed paperbacks are my favorite, because for some reason I seem to remember more about them, even books I read decades ago.

This one was published, gulp, thirty years ago. I couldn't believe it came out in 1979, but there it was. It has the strange title of I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, a memoir of Valium addiction, withdrawal and "psychiatric triumph". Oh, sign me up!

It's even more interesting to note that I marked up this book plenty with marginal comments and underlines, and highlighter so old you can barely see it any more. It sort of soaked through to the other side and marks passages that aren't relevant at

all.

At the time of the Valium disaster, Barbara Gordon was a successful (read: Emmy-winning) TV documentary producer with a wonderful life. Wonderful enough to inspire this description of her marvelous live-in lover, Eric:

"Eric made love like no man I had ever known. He was strong, tender and totally uninhibited. He touched, he felt, he laughed, he talked. As I fell asleep in his arms, I silently thanked my guardian angel for all my happiness, for the richness of my life."

Right. At the same time that she's rhapsodizing about how swell everything is, she's experiencing sweating, hammering panic attacks every day that force her to swallow copious quantities of Valium. Eric's little flaws (total financial dependency, no friends at all, two mentally ill ex-wives and a child he is forbidden to see) just sort of blur by her.

And yet, even consuming an astonishing 30 milligrams of Valium a day, she is able to function so well at work that she wins national awards.

This is a curious memoir, and I was only to find out later that Gordon took huge liberties with the facts, moving events around in time and changing a lot of what she calls "details". When she goes cold turkey on the Valium, her doctor reassuring her it isn't addictive, she describes violent spasms of withdrawal:

"My scalp started to burn as if I had hot coals under my hair. Then I began to experience funny little twitches, spasms, a jerk of a leg, a flying arm, tiny tremors that soon turned into convulsions."

Still she insists she doesn't need to taper off. She wants to do this, womanfully, in one go. Eric cheers her on and feeds and supports her and listens to her endless weepy monologues about her unhappy childhood.

At first. And then. . . and then, inexplicably, things change. More to the point, Eric changes - into something unrecognizable.

This hideous metamorphasis into monsterhood happens after five years of cohabiting in apparent bliss. Barbara describes him as "nearly six feet tall, with a head of thick black hair, graying slightly at the temples, a gentle smile, a marvelous mixture of man and boy." Well, maybe this woman was more drugged-out than she thought, because (according to her book) this marvelous man-boy would soon be verbally slicing her into pieces, cutting her off from her friends, tying her to chairs and punching her in the face.

The rest of the memoir deals with Barbara's rescue, in the nick of time, by two of the dozens of wonderful friends she has (though they do seem to disappear in her times of greatest need). She ends up in a series of mental hospitals while doctors try to figure out what is wrong with her. They look right at the Valium and don't see it. Then, as now, that's the way psychiatry works.

Or doesn't work. What happens with Eric is even more disturbing: he wages a hate campaign against her, telling her friends blatant lies designed to throw them off-balance and poison them against Barbara.

Eventually she finds a wonderful, understanding therapist and spends months pouring out her childhood woes in true Freudian analytical fashion. More interestingly, she falls in love with a 25-year-old psych ward burnout with a prison record (involuntary manslaughter) from Riker's Island. My my, how this woman picks them!

All this is leading up to something I saw in a library in the early '80s: a book called Prince Valium, written by one Anton Holden. This was "the other side of Barbara Gordon's million-selling memoir", Holden's attempt to set the record straight. Instead, it ends up more twisted than ever.

Turns out Barbara's boyish boy friend "Eric" isn't a failed lawyer at all, but a film producer working in the same medium as Barbara. He's moderately successful, mainly for the Vixens in Chains kind of movies that drip creepiness. But he's smooth enough to hide his icy sociopathic core, especially from someone as infantile and utterly dependent as Barbara.

Holden insists that the dates in her memoir conflict wildly with reality, with a year passing between certain episodes instead of days. He paints himself as her would-be saviour, completely defeated by her narcissism and impossible demands. It becomes apparent pretty quickly that what this guy really wants is a piece of the action: he'd like to rake in some cash and fame of his own, while whitewashing what really happened between them.

But what really happened between them?

I wasn't there, but I can't see how a forty-year-old successful career woman could fall for a brute with a shiny surface, a man so parasitic he reduces his partner to voraciously chewing pills to deal with her anxiety: without her even knowing it. This is the thing that rattles my teeth.

Until her kindly saviour/psychologist enlightens her about it, she seems to have no idea at all that "Eric" is sucking the life out of her. He's so practiced a user, so smooth that she thinks she's happy.

I've never known a person consuming 30 milligrams of Valium a day who is happy.

Or even alive.

OK, so more is known about Valium withdrawal now, and many say it's because of Barbara Gordon's book. I won't say much more about Prince Valium now, though I may be commenting more on it later (I've just ordered a used copy. It's not hard to find, though I doubt if he broke any sales records: the book is too creepy, and loyalty to Gordon too strong).

The movie version of I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, starring the then-hot Jill Clayburgh, drew only a tepid response, mainly because it lacked the edge and twisted, complex dynamics of the original. Liza Minnelli, whose then-husband Jack Haley Jr. once presented her with a gold-plated Valium tablet, eventually ended up in rehab.

Mother's Little Helpers weren't so innocuous, after all.

Gordon describes Valium not as a tranquilizer, but "a leveller". I'd say she got it wrong. This Eric/Anton/boy/man/incubus levelled her long before she ended up in a locked ward with a 20-something boy friend who had killed somebody. I wonder if she's still alive today (she'd be over 70); what happened with Anton Holden, if there were any legal ramifications; if her subsequent books made any money. One of them, Jennifer Fever, was about relationships between older men and younger women. Might as well title it, The Sky is Blue.

Contrary to what most people seem to think, the Valium didn't screw up Barbara Gordon's life. Going off the Valium didn't screw up Barbara Gordon's life. Not even Eric did. It was her own bad choices. Even addicts choose the poisons they put into themselves, and only they can choose to stop.

And nasty, brutish partners don't fall from the sky.

Novel #3: I need a (not-so-secret) agent

Reviews of BETTER THAN LIFE and MALLORY

"Joy - heart-swelling, button-bursting, exhilarating, uplifting, exuberant joy - is at the centre of Margaret Gunning's first novel, Better than Life. The details, the turns of phrase, the sharp observances that evoke both place and characters in a small town in Ontario at the end of the 1960s, are infused with a sense of lightness and humour that borders on the divine. Redemption overrides judgement every time in this carefully crafted novel, and Gunning manages to illuminate that which is dark and secret with that which is rich and riotous in colour. She is an author able to open up the world of a fractured but seeking people and bring them into light, healing and hope. Better Than Life is fiction at its finest."
- Edmonton Journal

"As Anderson-Dargatz did with her town of Likely and Stephen Leacock did with Mariposa, Gunning has created a fictional place that's recognizable to anyone who has ever lived in a small town. . . This delightful novel looks like a contender for the Leacock Medal. It may be just the book to bring some light into the room as the grey days of the rainy season settle in."
- Vancouver Sun

“Gunning does period ambience with a minimum of well-chosen references. Her expressive turns can spur shivers of pleasure. It’s a book that seduces quickly, then pulls you happily through an afternoon.”
- Globe and Mail

“It’s short and breezy, by times droll, intermittently serious and, ultimately, warm as toast. It could be in every shopping cart in the country.”
- Montreal Gazette

"There is a contagious energy to Gunning's prose which often -- and accurately -- delineates Mallory's intense emotional improvisation, child-like perspicacity and surprisingly mature realizations. Marketed as adult fiction, this is a book that could very easily attract a younger crowd, hungry for the extremes of experience and sensation Mallory represents.”
- Globe and Mail

“Margaret Gunning writes with uncanny grace and unflinching clarity about what it is to be a young girl forgotten by the world. She captures the heartbreak of loneliness and separateness, the fear and self-loathing of adolescent girlhood, with a gentle, sympathetic touch. And she manages to make Mallory complex and fully human in the process -- both victim and torturer, brilliant yet painfully naive, innocent yet seething with awakening sexual desire. The ominous feeling that underscores much of the novel is reminiscent of the best work of another Canadian author, Ann-Marie MacDonald, whose girl heroes seem to inhabit this same dark world.”
- Edmonton Journal

OK, maybe you needed to read these first. Maybe that's why my original post disappeared as I tried to cut-and-paste this. Maybe now you'll see why I am so frustrated.

There's a myth floating around in writers' circles that if you have one book that is favorably received, you're "in" and don't need to worry any more. So what happens if you have two? The comments above are just a small sampling of my reviews for Better than Life and Mallory, my first two novels. Mallory got no negative reviews at all, and BTL got only one. Both were very favorably reviewed in the books section of Canada's national newspaper, the Globe and Mail. Several of the reviews appeared in American publications which hadn't even been sent a copy. This just doesn't happen, and my first publisher called it "a miracle" (implying it had been a spontaneous act of God and not the result of my own skill and hard work).

Funny how miracles can come apart, almost as if they never happened. Sales of my first two books were abysmal, and I can't tell you why. I do know, after 25 years of being a reviewer, that some books generate "buzz" before they even go to press. Why? I will never know. It's an alchemy, a magic I don't seem to be able to capture.

I need someone to represent me. That much is plain. I need to make that leap. The novel I am ready to publish is called The Glass Character: a fictional retelling of the life and work of a long-ignored genius, silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd. I didn't just research this topic: I became Harold Lloyd, I saw the world through his glasses, I climbed high, hung on to the hands of the clock, and fell from a great height.

I am ready. But for what? For more head-banging, more trudging around, more slammed doors? I recently received the following rejection, no doubt carefully worded so as not to bruise my delicate feelings: "We may be turning down the next best-seller here, and I am sure it will find a good home soon, but I regret to tell you the answer is no."

People get there, they do. I see it. As a reviewer, I notice that a lot of very ordinary books of a certain genre do very well, and I mean every season. I'm probably breaking the writer's code of keeping your mouth shut no matter what hell you're going through. I should keep smiling while the best book I am ever likely to write goes nowhere.

Does my track record mean nothing? I wonder why no one in the industry can see that I made that "miracle" happen. It was my work, and I have a lot more. Here it is.

My e-mail address is magunning@shaw.ca. Perhaps it should appear in every post from now on.