My Latest Grievance
by Elinor Lipman
Summary
[Lipman’s] pitch-perfect new novel, set in 1978, introduces us to the beguiling Frederica Hatch. Born and raised in the dormitory of a small women’s college, and chafing under the care of “the most annoyingly evenhanded parental team in the history of civilization,”
Into this cozy world comes Miss Laura Lee French — a wannabe former Rockette and the new dorm mother. Laura Lee proves to be the enthralling and glamorous antithesis of the Hatches, whose passion for liberal political causes is all-consuming — even Frederica’s Barbie dolls have been anatomically corrected.
Lipman turns this seemingly routine faculty hire into a catalyst for havoc and hilarity. For it happens that Miss French — in the distant past — was married to none other than Frederica’s earnest and distinctly unglamorous father….
Excerpt
The Perfect Child
I was raised in a brick dormitory at Dewing College, formerly the Mary-Ruth Dewing Academy, a finishing school best known for turning out attractive secretaries who married up.
In the late 1950s, Dewing began granting baccalaureate degrees to the second-rate students it continued to attract despite its expansion into intellectual terrain beyond typing and shorthand. The social arts metamorphosed into sociology and psychology, nicely fitting the respective fields of job seekers Aviva Ginsburg Hatch, Ph.D., my mother, and David Hatch, Ph.D., my father. Twin appointments had been unavailable at the hundred more prestigious institutions they aspired and applied to. They arrived in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1960, not thrilled with the Dewing wages or benefits, but ever hopeful and prone to negotiation — two bleeding hearts that beat as one, conjoined since their first date in 1955 upon viewing a Movietone newsreel of Rosa Parks’s arrest.
Were they types, my parents-to-be? From a distance, and even to me for a long time, it appeared to be so. Over coffee in grad school they’d found that each had watched every black-and-white televised moment of the Army-McCarthy hearings, had both written passionately on The Grapes of Wrath in high school; both held Samuel Gompers and Pete Seeger in high esteem; both owned albums by the Weavers. Their wedding invitations, stamped with a union bug, asked that guests make donations in lieu of gifts to the presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson.
It was my father who proposed that their stable marriage and professional sensitivities would lend themselves to the rentfree benefit known as houseparenting. The dean of residential life said she was sorry, but a married couple was out of the question: Parents would not like a man living among their nubile daughters.
“What about a man with a baby?” my father replied coyly. It was a premature announcement. My mother’s period must have been no more than a week late at the time of that spring interview, but they both felt ethically bound to share the details of her menstrual calendar. He posited further: Weren’t two responsible, vibrant parents with relevant Ph.D.s better than their no doubt competent but often elderly predecessors, who — with all due respect — weren’t such a great help with homework and tended to die on the job? David and Aviva inaugurated their long line of labor-management imbroglios by defending my right to live and wail within the 3.5 rooms of their would-be apartment. If given the chance, they’d handle everything; they’d address potential doubts and fears head-on in a letter they’d send to parents and guardians of incoming Mary-Ruths, as we called the students, introducing themselves, offering their phone number, their curricula vitae, their open door, and their projected vision of nuclear familyhood.
The nervous dean gave the professors Hatch a one-year trial; after all, an infant in a dorm might disrupt residential life in ways no one could even project, prepartum. And consider the mumps, measles, and chicken pox a child would spread to the still susceptible and nonimmunized.
Copyright © 2006 by Elinor Lipman. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Reviews
“[A]satiric yet compassionate family portrait…Lipman addresses sensitive issues (anti-Semitism, adultery, dementia) with delicacy and acerbity”—Publishers Weekly
“The delights of the journey are everything. Elinor Lipman seems to find difficulty in taking herself seriously, but I think this is superstition”—The Washington Post
“Completely irresistible…highly recommended”—Library Journal
Author's Biography
More than just romantic comedy, Elinor Lipman writes what can best be described as sophisticated romantic commentary. She has been compared to Jane Austen for her talent in writing humorous social satire. With a string of bestselling novels under her belt, Lipman’s readers keep coming back for the great stories.