Almost Famous Women: Stories

There is currently a plethora of books that aim to bring women whose stories deserve to be more widely known to surface. If you ask me, I think it was about time. However, what makes me apprehensive is the fact that more doesn’t necessarily mean better and when something becomes a ‘’fashion’’, there is always the danger of losing quality and cohesion. This is what I found in this collection. An honest effort that severely lacked in execution and quality. The writer aimed to bring into focus women whose artistic, adventurous life deserves to be told. Instead of resorting to dry biographies, she chose to emphasize their psychology and personality through short stories inspired by their life and work. Unfortunately, I found most of them to be unsatisfying.The Pretty, Grown Together Children: A strange and strangely haunting story about conjoined twins. Fascinating.The Siege at Whale Cay: This one was an utter struggle. I didn’t like Joe or her views on life. I don’t think that being bossy and corrupt makes you heroic or worthy. Sorry.Norma Milley’s Film Noir Period: A house full of artistic women. A story about ambition, art, sisterhood, and understanding.Romaine Remains: An elderly painter residing in a villa in Italy with a Spanish young man as her sole companion. A moving, dark story.Hazel Eaton and the Wall of Death: A woman who defies death and forgets her daughter in the process. I failed to see how this story enhanced her character.The Autobiography of Allegra Byron: A moving story about Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughter and the woman who took her under her wings, fighting her own demons. Perhaps the best moment in the collection.Expression Theory: This is so bad it isn’t even worth commenting on…Saving Butterfly McQueen: A mixture of religion, Gone With the Wind, medicine and the word Saving in the title. In the immortal words of Michael Ballack, I am not impressed…Who Killed Dolly Wilde: An interesting story about an alluring writer in an atmosphere full of French decadence.A High Grade Bitch Sits Down For Lunch: The craving for adventure in beautiful Kenya. I really wanted this story to be longer.The Internees: A short, moving account from one of the survivors of Bergen-Belsen. However, I don’t think that this collection is the proper place for Holocaust victims to be included in. The way I see it, it is disrespectful to find them alongside opium lovers and glorified sex-crazed socialites.The Lottery, Redux: A cover story of The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Not particularly successful, in my opinion.Hell-Driving Women: Jazz atmosphere in a story with sociopolitical implications.The main problem I had with this collection was the unnecessary emphasis on sex through quite a few crude descriptions. In my opinion, most of the women described are interesting and powerful without having to be portrayed as sex-predators. The writer significantly undermined their personalities by this choice. All in all, this collection was an extremely mixed bag. There were a few beautiful moments but most of the women were turned into the stereotypes we all try to avoid. While the writing had its moments of beauty, very few stories resonated with me. Hence the 2 stars.

Short stories about almost famous women. This is a work of fiction created around 13 real women by the short story author, Megan Mayhew Bergman. While the author has written most of these stories based on real women she wants the reader to know that she used complete freedom, unlocking her imagination in creating these stories. Some of the women she covers are; Beryl Markham, Butterfly McQueen, Shirley Jackson, Romaine Brooks and Joe Carstairs as well as Allegra Byron, Dolly Wilde and Norma Millay who are related to famous characters we all know. I didn't know many of these women but was delighted to find out that Butterfly McQueen costarred in Gone With The Wind as Prissy. Joe Carstairs is a woman who raced speed boats and owned an island. Shirley Jackson is the author of The Lottery. The story Bergman writes is not about Shirley Jackson so much but a rewrite of The Lottery with a strong matriarchal theme. Allegra Byron was the illegitimate daughter of the poet Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont and Dolly Wilde was Oscar Wilde's niece. Beryl Markham was a pilot, author and Africa's first woman horse trainer. These are stories of tough, hard women. A quick read. I listened to the audio book through overdrive. Read by Lesa Lockford who does an excellent job of narrating the stories.

I love this book so hard. So hard I'm probably going to purchase it, which is big for me. It's a set of short stories about women who were on the fringes of fame. Stories about the girls in the background, who were forgotten, neglected, part of the scenery of other, more spectacular lives. The author has given voices to women whose whispers were too soft to resonate through the years. And it's feminist as hell. So there's that, too.

Overall, I really enjoyed these stories. Only one just didn't work for me and I gave up on it. Interested in reading more about several of the women featured.

Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman is a highly recommended collection of fictionalized stories that are, in varying degrees, about women from history who were almost famous.

While these stories are best classified as historical fiction, Bergman did try to tie her characters actions into real historical details about their lives. Some of the almost famous women take the forefront in the stories as the main character while others play an accidental, footnote, also appearing role, much as they seemed to have done in life. These are short, easy to read stories. Some of the women included are: Violet& Daisy Hilton, 'Joe' Carstairs, Lucia Joyce, Romaine Brooks, Norma Millay, Dolly Wilde, Butterfly McQueen, Tiny Davis, Hazel Watkins, Clara Byron, Beryl Markham, and the women of Bergen-Belsen.

Since it is often a fictionalized character other than the famous woman narrating the stories or telling their story, often the famous women play an incidental part in the story. I was a bit disappointed that the woman didn't have a bit more crucial role in all of the stories. As with any collection there were some stories I enjoyed more than others. There were also a couple stories that seemed repetitive rather than unique. Still, the well written stories all left me wanting more. It was great to have a list of resources Bergman used to research the lives of the women included at the end of the collection.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Scribner for review purposes.

Megan Mayhew Bergman's first book of short stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, was a highly regarded debut that looked at life from several angles. This time, in Almost Famous Women, she looks at women who have famous names, often because of famous relatives or because they are known for one thing.Neither of these conditions is anything close to conveying the complete aspect of who or what a person is, however, and Bergman uses both what is known about the women and what may be true about them to create yet more examples of who gets to tell a story about themselves and who owns history. How the rest of the world views these women is an undercurrent throughout the stories, not explicit yet always just there, threatening to drag them under.The sisters in Pretty, Grown-Together Children, the first story of the collection were called freaks, and appeared in Tod Browning's film of that name. Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins, lived from 1908 to 1969, and were vaudeville entertainers and grocery store clerks. Right there it's easy to see how any writer would want to wonder about their lives. How do conjoined twins handle the stage and the comedown of being grocery store clerks? How do they live? How do they manage the practical and the more elusive dreams? In reality, they died of the flu, Daisy first and Violet at least a day later.This opening story sets the stage for the collection: How do women, whether sisters or always on their own, handle dreams when it looks like life doesn't want them to dare hope for full lives? What keeps anyone going? No woman needs to be a conjoined twin to dare hope for a full life. Looking at the sisters, it's hard to imagine how anything about their lives could be the same as people not conjoined. But the story shows how every woman, every human being, is the same in the ability to dream of more and better, and both how we can fool ourselves and make at least part of a dream come true. It depends on what vantage point the story is being told from.The Siege at Whale Cay is about M.B. Joe Carstairs and the first to deal with post-traumatic stress for a WWI ambulance driver, although the story does not initially focus on the war. It is instead a complex story about a rich lesbian who owns a small island off the Florida coast, who deliberately closes her eyes to the suffering of another woman on her island. In the role of the conscience of the story is her latest young lover, a young woman who was a mermaid in a tourist trap, now competing for her older lover's attention with a famous, reclusive, cold movie star.More famous people feature in Norma Millay's Film Noir Period. It is about being the one who serves the famous person, the famous sister, the mother with talent, regardless of what you can or might be able to do. And what happens afterwards when that is all you have. A companion story, Who Killed Dolly Wilde, appears later in the collection. Both also are tied to both The Siege at Whale Cay and Romaine Remains, partly because one or more of the characters knew each other. There also is a connection in the theme of being caregivers to older women whose faded glory is more of a curse or a haunting to both the famous person and to the caregiver. Having once been famous certainly doesn't seem to be worth much.Romaine Brooks in Romaine Remains, is an paranoid, angry old woman, as is Oscar's niece Dolly. Romaine's younger male nurse realizes when reading letters she will not touch "there is vitality in the world, and he does not have it, he has never even tasted it in his mouth. He has never lived the way he wants to live, never felt in control, or able to express his desire for people and things. For men in new leather shoes drinking wine at the hotel bar, or the boys standing outside the less reputable discotecas smoking cigarettes. He has never been explicitly himself." The talented woman is the one without power, the one who is used. Mario the nurse doesn't seem to recognize how alike he and Romaine are, just at different times of their lives.Dolly isn't doing well in her later years either. Like Joe Carstairs, she was a WWI ambulance driver and it still hurts her. Dolly once was popular because of her uncle and her resemblance to him, but now is a drug addict who no one wants around except the childhood friend who still tries to believe in her. It's a story about unfulfilled lives and how war cripples inside as well as outside, and about how caring doesn't always involve the same tasks.Care-taking at the other end of life's spectrum is the story of a nun in The Autobiography of Allegra Byron. A nun whose own child died years ago finds herself loving the cast-off child of the poet. This story is about learning how to give up what was never yours to begin with, but loving any way, which can be a caregiver's burden.The child of another famous writer, the daughter of James Joyce, notes a burden on the other side of fame in Expression Theory. In this moody, dank tone poem about creating dance, she says: "I have no native tongue, L. says. What do you expect?" Good question. What should be expected of the child of someone who did so much with language? Or an even better question, why should that child be burdened with expectations?For some, childhood expectations and that stage in a girl-child's life when crushes come easily can sometimes lead to life changes. A girl at just that stage, crushing on a minister, agrees to go see Butterfly McQueen. The Butterfly McQueen, who is as famous for being an atheist as she once was for a few lines in a big movie that is a central part of the myth of the state where she lives. The 80-year-old atheist turns away the girl sent to evangelize at her door, but opens the child's eyes and mind to wondering and questioning. Unvarnished truth is important to her.The girl, now a woman studying medicine and conducting her first autopsy in class, remembers:"My mother's was the first dead body I knew, the first one I touched. ... She wanted a wig and the mortician's makeup for the casket. I didn't pass along her wishes. Does it matter what we do when consciousness has passed? I was the one who had to look at her, and I wanted the real her, even if the real her was hairless and wasted."Her conclusion is one of those earth-stopping moments in reading. It's a simple statement that is all the more profound for it, and the wisdom of it can be questioned and admired at the same time:"What I hope, I guess, is that the right kind of callus will form around my heart."This sort of fearlessness, a type of defiance at what sentimental society demands of its women, is at the heart of a story about Beryl Markham. The title, A High-Grade Bitch Sits Down for Lunch, uses the name Hemingway gave her (which I see as a honor he did not intend to convey). For Markham, living on her own in Africa, channeling that defiance is essential to survival. "She'd always been a cruel person, she knew that, and today it was in her favor."There is cruelty in the last story in the collection, too, mostly from men, white men, fascinated and disgusted by the women of color in a band traveling through the Jim Crow south. In Hell-Driving Women, that callus around their hearts from the Butterfly McQueen story allows some of them to protect their hearts, not cut them off completely.The women in these stories would never pass for Harriet Nelson. This leads to wondering whether that's society saying women must not be "normal" to strive to be famous or to stand out, or that if they are not "normal" wives and mothers, can they hope to be anything except freaks? This is something that is not explicit in the stories, however, but is more the kind of thinking that Bergman's stories allow.The women, according to the way the world usually regards them and treats them, are supposed to be grateful to be in supportive, secondary roles, and to fade away quietly when someone else deems it is time for them to do so. The moments of happiness are fleeting, but those moments show that living in the moment is the way to find joy. Holding on to it is bittersweet at best. Defiantly going to one's fate is more of a victory than giving in quietly. Loving living is the best revenge.

I will admit to spending quite a bit of time looking up many of the people these stories were written about. All exceedingly well written though, but there were two that really resonated with me. The two about the oldest and the youngest. Romaine remains, after a fully decadent life Romaine is now 93 and housebound. The people who are hired to care for her take advantage of her in many ways. Something about being that elderly and becoming a victim after living a life on virtually her own terms just filled me with pity.The second story was the story of Allegra Byron, which starts when she is three. So incredibly sad, this young lady and her short tragic life. Loved the author for imagining someone who really loved her and tried to care for her, show her a little joy. Found myself hoping such a person actually existed.Anyway there is something here that would appeal to anyone who loves short stories, although most have a common theme they are all written differently but oh so interestingly.ARC from publisher.I will admit to spending quite a bit of time looking up many of the people these stories were written about. All exceedingly well written though, but there were two that really resonated with me. The two about the oldest and the youngest. Romaine remains, after a fully decadent life Romaine is now 93 and housebound. The people who are hired to care for her take advantage of her in many ways. Something about being that elderly and becoming a victim after living a life on virtually her own terms just filled me with pity.The second story was the story of Allegra Byron, which starts when she is three. So incredibly sad, this young lady and her short tragic life. Loved the author for imagining someone who really loved her and tried to care for her, show her a little joy. Found myself hoping such a person actually existed.Anyway there is something here that would appeal to anyone who loves short stories, although most have a common theme they are all written differently but oh so interestingly.ARC from publisher.

Well, it was not the book I expected! The story I most appreciated and found the most sympathy with was the one of Oscar Wikde's niece. But by and large, I did not like these women. Taken as a whole, they are certainly thought provoking.

The concept for this short story collection is a terrific one: each story focuses on an 'almost famous' woman. Included are the sister of Edna St. Vincent Millay; James Joyce's mad daughter, Lucia; Oscar Wilde's lookalike niece, Dolly, a socialite and heroin addict; Lord Byron's three-year old daughter, Allegra; a black lesbian trumpet player risking violence by playing in a racially mixed jazz band in the 1950s American South; and many more. The narrators are most often peripheral characters--a childhood friend of Dolly Wilde, a nun who cared for Allegra in the convent; the bus driver of the all-girl band; a young girl who had tried to turn declared atheist Butterfly McQueen (Scarlett's maid in 'Gone with the Wind') to Jesus .As I said, this was a great concept, but unfortunately, most of the stories fell flat.

First off, Bergman is a wonderful story writer. She has a way of shaping stories from the most basic components and making them very much alive. Her stories are intelligent and expressive. Secondly, I love the concept of this book. Here are women we know little or nothing of, women who were “almost famous” because of the men were in the company of, or “almost famous” because they were notable, but just not quite visible enough in a patriarchal society. Here these women are reimagined, given new life and a chance to tell their stories. Many of these stories felt more to me like the product of Bergman's imagination than based on truths; however, a glance at the author's notes reveals she conducted considerable research.All that aside, Almost Famous Women is a good book with a great concept, but the stories don't quite match the caliber of Bergman's previous effort, Birds of a Lesser Paradise. While there are many stellar stories in her first collection, Almost Famous Women is full of consistently good stories, almost great stories, but none quite as wonderful as “Housewifely Arts,” “Another Story She Won't Believe,” or “Saving Face.” Birds of a Lesser Paradise is worth the time to read because of its best stories. Almost Famous Women is worth the time because of the interesting characters it introduces the reader to.Personal favorite included “The Siege at Whale Cay” and “Saving Butterfly McQueen.”

Collection of short stories involving women who had some fame during their time.