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Strings Attached
In her first novel, Gay Walley weaves two stories into a seamless narrative--a woman's quest for love, and the drunken, vagabond childhood she endured with her father.
Raised on a barstool, Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. As an adult, in one of her father's haunts, she encounters the man whose flaws and attractions will make her face every emotion that confounded her dad. She longs for companionship, but from her father she has learned to trust only her own will and crave solitude. Can she overcome a life of defiant independence and her distrust of affection?
Walley's daring prose style allows the writer to make Charlee's rough but endearing past immediate and vital in her present.
"I often think the truth," Charlee supposes, "was that my father lost me in a card game. He was losing; indeed, he lost everything. The men are all sitting around the bar, and this card game is a secret, all-consuming vice of my father's. He will do anything to keep in the game. And he says, 'Okay, I've got nothing except my daughter. When she's eighteen, you can have her. You can take her and do whatever the hell you like.'"
Populated with tough, brilliant characters who crisscross New England, Strings Attached is a novel about the search for love, about the possibilities and impossibilities of that quest. Walley says, "These searching characters fall away and toward each other, as we do in every love affair, and come to their ultimate truths."
Raised on a barstool, Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. As an adult, in one of her father's haunts, she encounters the man whose flaws and attractions will make her face every emotion that confounded her dad. She longs for companionship, but from her father she has learned to trust only her own will and crave solitude. Can she overcome a life of defiant independence and her distrust of affection?
Walley's daring prose style allows the writer to make Charlee's rough but endearing past immediate and vital in her present.
"I often think the truth," Charlee supposes, "was that my father lost me in a card game. He was losing; indeed, he lost everything. The men are all sitting around the bar, and this card game is a secret, all-consuming vice of my father's. He will do anything to keep in the game. And he says, 'Okay, I've got nothing except my daughter. When she's eighteen, you can have her. You can take her and do whatever the hell you like.'"
Populated with tough, brilliant characters who crisscross New England, Strings Attached is a novel about the search for love, about the possibilities and impossibilities of that quest. Walley says, "These searching characters fall away and toward each other, as we do in every love affair, and come to their ultimate truths."
197 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1999
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About the author
Gay Walley
9 books1 followerUnder the pen name, GAY WALLEY, Jacqueline Gay Walley has published four novels, Strings Attached (finalist for the Capricorn and Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner Award); The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable: Aphorisms on Art, Love, and the Vicissitudes of Life (finalist for Paris Book Award); Lost in Montreal; and Duet. Her award-winning play, Love, Genius and a Walk opened in New York City in 2013 and will open in London Fall of 2021. Her film, Erotic Fire of the Unattainable: Longing to be Found has been selected and shown in the 2020 virtual Brooklyn Film Festival, Sarasota Film Festival, Cinequest Film Festival and will show in American Fringe Festival in Paris in November 2021. She teaches writing privately in New York City, as well as edits and ghostwrites.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 26, 2022
The author takes us to the dark bars where she spent her childhood with her alcoholic father, and the strong bond she has with him despite his often inattentive fathering. The resilience and wise perspective of Charlee as a child is captivating. This paternal relationship is echoed in later relationships - with her boyfriend/husband and with other men with whom she interacts as an adult - always caring and mothering men with lost souls, always looking to find herself and to untie the strings that bind her to them. The descriptions of the bars and of her place by the sea are wonderful.
"I cried when Peter walked out the door to return to his house by the sea, as if he were taking strings of me. I cried as I tried to untie what seems untieable, and cried as I tied it back up again. I cried for my terrible desire for love."
And parts where one just has to smile - "It is an awful thing to fall inlove with a man who drinks. Never mind the obvious. But the courtship. the courtship is askew.
On the good side, You know where he can be found."
"I cried when Peter walked out the door to return to his house by the sea, as if he were taking strings of me. I cried as I tried to untie what seems untieable, and cried as I tied it back up again. I cried for my terrible desire for love."
And parts where one just has to smile - "It is an awful thing to fall inlove with a man who drinks. Never mind the obvious. But the courtship. the courtship is askew.
On the good side, You know where he can be found."
June 17, 2024
"Strings Attached" is a book to keep and to go back to. That is exactly what I did. I read this many years ago when it was published by the University of Mississippi Press and was a finalist for the Faulkner Award. I remember being enthralled, not able to put it down. Now re-reading the handy, perfectly sized IML publication, I am overwhelmed with the power of the voice, a young girl's coming of age in bars with a drinking single dad and the search for her own autonomy and also with the narrative, how Walley weaves the story of the girl and the father, and her adult life back and forth and has the courage to trust the reader's intelligence to keep up with her. Keeping up with Gay Walley is well worth it. This is the first of the Venus as She Ages series, a theme too neglected in our American literature. I hope you read every one and keep them all to go back to. Soon (June, 2024) we will have "The Waw," the latest in this series.
December 27, 2012
Interesting writing style but I enjoyed the story overall. Not as much character development as I normal appreciate but some of the words describing "relationships" were so profound I found myself reading them over and over again just to grasp the full meaning. I might enjoy another book by this author if I can find one.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews