Goodbye, Amelia

by Gerard Jones

Cultural Writing. Memoir. GINNY GOOD "captures the spirit of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s and tells the story of Jones' lifes as Ginny ("the first hippie") drifts into and out of it"--Publisher's Marketplace. "A soothingly disturbing bittersweet elixir. By turns deliciously funny and poignantly painful, it wanders and rambles in and out of the messiness of life. It's real. It's human. You will be different for having immersed yourself in it. GINNY GOOD has the soul and guts and truth of a classic of American literature"--Donna McDougle.

Genres: Fiction

350 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2004

About the author

Gerard Jones is an award-winning American author and comic book writer. From 1987 to 2001, Jones wrote many comic books for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Viz Media, Malibu Comics and other publishers; including Green Lantern, Justice League, Prime, Ultraforce, El Diablo, Wonder Man, Martian Manhunter, Elongated Man, The Shadow, Pokémon, and Batman.

Jones is author of the Eisner Award-winning Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (2004); Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes and Make-Believe Violence (2002), and Honey I'm Home: Sitcoms Selling the American Dream (1993). Jones is co-author with Will Jacobs of The Beaver Papers (1983), The Comic Book Heroes (1985, 1996), and the comic book The Trouble with Girls (1987-1993). From 1983 to 1988, Jacobs and Jones were contributors to National Lampoon magazine. He and Jacobs began writing humorous fiction again in 2008 with the online series My Pal Splendid Man and Million Dollar Ideas

Reviews

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

Falling in a muddied land between prose and poetry, this book entrances and hypnotizes and, more than once, I came away from it with my head full of cotton and clouds and sunlight. One blurb for this book says, "I haven't read anything in years that captures so well the beauty of being young", and, indeed, I came away from this book feeling the same kind of openness and idealism I had in my younger days.

Simone Felice is a wonder.

[Tim Nason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, dreamlike and assured writings of what seems like a writer’s journal or diary, a motley collection of stories, observations, speculations and mysteries with maybe a parable toward the end and even a brief polemic here and there. They do not strictly adhere to accepted concepts of story, narrative voice, location or time period. Characters appear and situations occur and these suffice. I found two sentences in the book that nicely characterize its unifying arrangement. The first is from “Out the Train Window”: “She folds the random textiles and lets them fall into a basket at her feet.” The second is from “Pieces of the Carpenter”: “She has an assortment of flowers tied up in her hair in such a wild and strange way as to make us think that this were the first time that a woman had ever tried such a thing, with no learned or practiced technique to this lovely multicolored prototype.”

[Clay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scattered. It was difficult for me to get through, considering poetry is not something I don't really relate with. Some of the writings I did happen to understand and it was amazing how crazily objects and people can be described and compared with. Bitter sweet.

[Yvette Irvine · Rating 4 out of 5]

As well as being a wonderful musician, Simone Felice is a wonderful writer. The story of Amelia could easily translate to one of his songs.