#SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT RITA MAE BROWN FULL#

#SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT RITA MAE BROWN FULL#

Where the hospital scenes were full of contrived blessings or parting shots from family and friends, now we get to read the letters, see and hear the cataclysmic reactions of Libby, Frazier’s cold, controlling mom Billy, her closeted and shallow gay escort/friend Ann, her closeted, overly needy lover, and Carter, her priapic, alcoholic brother. It’s the best part because it’s here that Brown allows her characters some slack to live their own lives. But the letters have already been mailed, and the best part of the novel is about to begin. She’s only got a nasty case of misdiagnosed bronchitis. This she decides to do, by letter, right before she finds out that-whoops!-she’s not dying at all. She has also never told most of the people in her life that she is a lesbian. Somebody had to do it.) Frazier, as Mary is known to her friends, is cut from the same cloth as Molly and Hortensia, except that it takes a botched cancer diagnosis to drag her out of the stifling upper-class closet she’s grown accustomed to.Īs the book opens, the terminally ill hero is sitting in her Porthault-sheeted hospital bed, counting her blessings (“No more mortgage payments and no more vile temptation as the doors of Tiffany’s yawn at me like the very gate of Hell”) and her regrets (“She had never truly loved anyone”).

Now we meet 35-year-old Mary Frazier Armstrong in Brown’s new novel “Venus Envy.” (Don’t groan. Rita Mae Brown is the bestselling author of the Sister Jane novels-Outfoxed, Hotspur, Full Cry, The Hunt Ball, The Hounds and the Fury, The Tell-Tale Horse, and Hounded to Death-as well as the Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries and Rubyfruit Jungle, In Her Day, Six of One, and The Sand Castle, among many others. A prodigious output no matter how erratically crafted some of the work is. In all, there have been 14 books over the last 20 years-mysteries, novels and even a how-to book about writing. Hortensia Banastre, from “Southern Discomfort” (1982), is a rich white woman in 1918 Montgomery who has a passionate love affair with a 15-year-old black boxer named Hercules Jinks. Molly Bolt, the hero of her first novel, “Rubyfruit Jungle” (1973), is a dashing iconoclast who is one of the first characters in literature to break the lesbian-as-misfit stereotype. We readers enjoy it as well, especially when Brown doesn’t take herself too seriously in the attempt to be profound. What Rita Mae Brown does best is create irreverent individualists, usually lesbians, who thumb their noses, always attractive, at society and then have a great time watching everybody squirm.

Southern discomfort rita mae brown