Welcome to the World, Baby Girl
Fannie Flagg, 1998
Random House
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804118682
Summary
Once again, Flagg's humor and respect and affection for her characters shine forth. Many inhabit small-town or suburban America.
But this time, her heroine is urban: a brainy, beautiful, and ambitious rising star of 1970s television. Dena Nordstrom, pride of the network, is a woman whose future is full of promise, her present rich with complications, and her past marked by mystery.
Among the colorful cast of characters are:
- Sookie, of Selma, Alabama, Dena's exuberant college roommate, who is everything that Dena is not; she is thrilled by Dena's success and will do everything short of signing autographs for her; Sookie's a mom, a wife, and a Kappa forever.
- Dena's cousins, the Warrens, and her aunt Elner, of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, endearing, loyal, talkative, ditsy, and, in their way, wise.
- Neighbor Dorothy, whose spirit hovers over them all through the radio show that she broadcast from her home in the 1940s.
- Sidney Capello, pioneer of modern sleaze journalism and privateer of privacy, and Ira Wallace, his partner in tabloid television.
- Several doctors, all of them taken with—and almost taken in by-Dena
There are others, captivated by a woman who tries to go home again, not knowing where home or love lie. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Real Name—Patricia Neal
• Birth—September 21, 1944
• Where—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—University of Alabama
• Currently—lives in Montecito, California
Fannie Flagg began writing and producing television specials at age nineteen and went on to distinguish herself as an actress and writer in television, films, and the theater. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (which was produced by Universal Pictures as Fried Green Tomatoes), Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Standing in the Rainbow, and A Redbird Christmas. Flagg’s script for Fried Green Tomatoes was nominated for both the Academy and Writers Guild of America awards and won the highly regarded Scripters Award. Flagg lives in California and in Alabama.
Before her career as a novelist, Flagg was known principally for her on-screen television and film work. She was second banana to Allen Funt on the long-running Candid Camera, perhaps the trailblazer for the current crop of so-called reality television. (Her favorite segment, she told Entertainment Weekly in 1992, was driving a car through the wall of a drive-thru bank.) She appeared as the school nurse in the 1978 film version of Grease, and on Broadway in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And she was a staple of the Match Game television game shows in the '70s.
Quite early on in her writing career, Fannie Flagg stumbled onto the holy grail of secrets in the publishing world: what editors are actually good for.
Attending the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference in 1978 to see her idol, Eudora Welty, Flagg won first prize in the writing contest for a short story told from the perspective of a 11-year-old girl, spelling mistakes and all—a literary device that she figured was ingenious because it disguised her own pitiful spelling, later determined to be an outgrowth of dyslexia. But when a Harper & Row editor approached her about expanding the story into a full-length novel, she realized the jig was up. In 1994 she told the New York Times:
I just burst into tears and said, "I can't write a novel. I can't spell. I can't diagram a sentence." He took my hand and said the most wonderful thing I've ever heard. He said, "Oh, honey, what do you think editors are for?"
Writing
And so Fannie Flagg—television personality, Broadway star, film actress and six-time Miss Alabama contestant—became a novelist, delving into the Southern-fried, small-town fiction of the sort populated by colorful characters with homespun, no-nonsense observations. Characters that are known to say things like, "That catfish was so big the photograph alone weighed 40 pounds."
Her first novel, an expanded take on that prize-winning short story, was Coming Attractions: A Wonderful Novel, the story of a spunky yet hapless girl growing up in the South, helping her alcoholic father run the local bijou. But it was with her second novel where it all came together. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe—a novel, for all its light humor, that infuses its story with serious threads on racism, feminism, spousal abuse and hints at Sapphic love -- follows two pairs of women: a couple running a hometown café in the Depression-era South and an elderly nursing home resident in the late 1980s who strikes up an impromptu friendship with a middle-aged housewife unhappy with her life.
The result was not only a smash novel, but a hit movie as well, one that garnered Flagg an Academy Award nomination for adapting the screenplay. She won praise from the likes of Erma Bombeck, Harper Lee and idol Eudora Welty, and the Los Angeles Times critic compared it to The Last Picture Show. The New York Times called it, simply, "a real novel and a good one."
As a writer, though, this Birmingham, Alabama native found her voice as a chronicler of Southern Americana and life in its self-contained hamlets. "Fannie Flagg is the most shamelessly sentimental writer in America," The Christian Science Monitor wrote in a 1998 review of her third novel. "She's also the most entertaining. You'd have to be a stone to read Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! without laughing and crying. The cliches in this novel are deep-fat fried: not particularly nutritious, but entirely delicious."
The New York Times, also reviewing Baby Girl, took note of the spinning-yarns-on-the-front-porch quality to her work: "Even when she prattles—and she prattles a great deal during this book—you are always aware that a star is at work. She has that gift that certain people from the theater have, of never boring the audience. She keeps it simple, she keeps it bright, she keeps it moving right along—and, most of all, she keeps it beloved."
But, lest she be pegged as simply a champion of the good ol’ days, it's worth noting that her writing can be something of a clarion call for social change. In Fried Green Tomatoes, Flagg comments not only on the racial divisions of the South but also on the minimization of women in both the 1930s and contemporary life. Just as Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison commit to a life together—without menfolk—in the Depression-era days of Whistle Stop, Alabama, middle-aged Evelyn Couch in modern-day Birmingham discovers the joys of working outside the home and defining her life outside meeting the every whim of her husband.
On top of her writing, Flagg has also stumped for the Equal Rights Amendment.
I think it's time that women have to stand up and say we do not want to be seen in a demeaning manner," Flagg told a Premiere magazine reporter in an interview about the film adaptation of Fried Green Tomatoes.
Extras
• Flagg approximated the length of her first novel by weight. Her editor told her a novel should be around 400 pages. "So I weighed 400 pages and it came to two pounds and something," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987." I wrote until I had two pounds and something, and, as it happened, the novel was just about done."
• She landed the Candid Camera gig while a writer at a New York comedy club. When one of the performers couldn't go on, Flagg acted as understudy, and the show's host, Allen Funt, was in the audience.
• Flagg went undiagnosed for years as a dyslexic until a viewer casually mentioned it to her in a fan letter. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
I found the whole thing rather enjoyable....[Flagg] keeps it simple, she keeps it bright, she keeps it moving right along.
Robert Plunket - New York Times
Because so much of Flagg's third novel takes place in the 1970s media-celebrity echelons of New York City, it doesn't offer the regional and historical color and texture of its predecessor, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Instead, Flagg's achievement here lies in a well-choreographed story of loyalty and survival that zigzags deftly across the post-war years, panning in on the never-changing decency of Elmwood Springs, Mo., then pulling back to watch national TV news devolve into sensationalism--all the while drawing us into the compelling life of Dena Nordstrom. Star of America's most popular morning news show, Dena shuts herself down and shuts men out for painful reasons that are unknown even to her. Only after the stress of ambush- and sound-byte journalism brings on a hemorrhaging ulcer does Dena slowly unearth the scandal that, when Dena was four, drove her mother from Elmwood Springs, hometown of the war hero father that Dena never knew. That her mother's nemesis is a newspaper gossipmonger is nicely ironic, although her mother's secret shame seems slightly larger than life. In contrast, Dena's college friend Sookie and great aunt Elner are reminders of how well Flagg can cook up memorable women from the most down-to-earth ingredients, while a cameo by Tennessee Williams is uncannily true to life. Fans may be sorry at first to leave Elmwood Springs for the big city, but even the most reluctant will get wrapped up in Dena's search for the truth about her family and her past.
Publishers Weekly
Ultimately, the experience of reading Baby Girl is much like eating a chocolate eclair (or, if you prefer, like having mediocre sex). In other words, you have to go through a lot of air and fat before you get to the custard. Not that the book isn't highly readable—it is, much like the back of a cereal box is readable. It's also exasperating, and in the end, the episodic nature and often-ponderous dialogue make it seem more like watching a TV movie than reading a novel. —Cara Jepsen
BookPage
The author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe returns with another engaging paean to the joys of down-home southern life. Gorgeous, ambitious Dena Nordstrom is doing very well in '70s Manhattan. She's the popular star of a network morning show, poised to rise as the ratings-driven TV industry promotes appealing women to make palatable the increasingly nasty interviews that are turning the news into scandal mongering 'entertainment.' Dena barely remembers Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where she spent four happy years before her mysterious mother abruptly left town and embarked on a decade of wandering before vanishing from 15-year-old Dena's life altogether in 1959. But the folks back in Elmwood Springs remember Baby Girl, daughter of a local boy killed in WWII, and Flagg has some obvious but effective fun with the contrast between the townspeople's homey-to-the-verge-of-caricature existence and Dena's high-powered urban-professional lifestyle. Of course, she's not really happy: she drinks too much and has bleeding ulcers that send her, acting reluctantly on doctor's orders, to a handsome psychiatrist (who falls in love with her at first sight, natch) and then back to Elmwood Springs to recuperate from overwork. Readers may share Dena's initial reaction to the relentlessly folksy locals ('Get me out of here,' she commands her agent), but the New York cast of characters is just as cliched: noble, Walter Cronkite-like anchorman; sleazy network executive; sleazier 'researcher"/dirt-digger. The author does, however, know how to spin a rattling good yarn. Even those who gag at the way she holds up 'Neighbor Dorothy' and her hokey 1940s radio show as the epitome of small-town goodness will probably find themselves flipping pages rapidly to discover what happened to Dena's mother. The denouement has a clever twist, and if the happy ending is not exactly a surprise, it taps into enough classic American fantasies about getting out of the rat race to be quite moving. Shamelessly corny and extremely enjoyable.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. This novel tells of Dena's long journey home. What does home look and sound and smell like to you? Is it a place or a state of mind?
2. "Elmswood Springs is a town that likes itself." Do you agree with this assessment of Dena's hometown? How does Dena's opinion of the town change over the course of the novel?
3. The Smith family talks about being able to stop time. Would you like to have this power? If you could, when would you freeze time in your own life?
4. Aunt Elner would want to be at home with her family and friends if she knew the end of the world was coming. What would you do?
5. What has caused Dena's identity crisis? How does she manage to keep the people in her life fooled about her real condition for so long?
6. Why are people in Dena's life so persistent even though she continually shuts them out? Did you ever lose patience with her?
7. Why does Gerry O'Malley believe in true love? Do you think it exists?
8. Why does Dena sleep through Christmas every year and then lie about it? Many people have very conflicted feelings about the holidays for a whole host of reasons. How do you feel about holidays? Do you ever want to sleep through them?
9. Dena is initially very resistant to therapy. How much do you think therapy helped her in the end? Did this novel challenge or confirm your own opinions about therapy?
10. Dena's therapist tells her: I think you are mistaking a profession for a personal identity." Discuss the meaning of this statment. Does it apply to anyone you know?
11. Ask each person in your reading group to give three answers to the question: who are you? How easy or difficult is thisto do? Do you have any answers in common?
12. What was the significance of Dena's recurring dream about the house with the carousel?
13. Dena gets to interview Tennessee Williams, an artist who inspired her. If you could interview a person who has had a major impact on your personal/and or professional development, who would it be? What would you ask them?
14. This novel examines the nature of celebrity in modern America. Why does Dena want to be famous? And why does she eventually reject it? Is celebrity something you would want for yourself?
15. Discuss the negative impact gossip in the media has on various characters in this novel. Where do you think the line should be drawn regarding the private lives of public people?
(Questions issued by publisher.)