The Smart One and the Pretty One
Page 27
About the Author
I grew up and went to school in Newton, Massachusetts. Back then my name was Claire Scovell. A few months after I graduated from Newton South High, my parents dropped me off in Harvard Yard. They picked me and my dirty laundry up about four years later. Once my laundry was done, I left home to seek my fortune.
The eighties were a decade of bad hair, bad clothing, and bad judgment, and the less said about them the better. Happily, I survived, emerging with a new last name and a new state of residence.
Just to be clear, my tenure as a Californian is temporary. I’m only staying here long enough to bring up my kids and grow old in the sunshine and be buried next to Marilyn Monroe, and then I’m moving right back to the East Coast. Leave a light on.
I’m the youngest of five and my husband is the youngest of four, and together we have four children—three boys and one girl. This is the fourth book I’ve had published and my third novel. My fourth child celebrated his fourth birthday on the fourth day of the fourth month in the year 2004. None of this is significant.
I feel very lucky that I get to do what I love and still be home every day to greet my kids when they come home from school. How they feel about it will eventually come out in therapy.
Since this book is about sisters, here are five of my own favorite famous sister groups:
1. The March sisters
(Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy) from Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women
—Coming upon my sister reading Little Women for the very first time, my aunt instantly warned her not to get too attached to Beth. Where was she when I was reading Old Yeller?
2. The Bouvier sisters
(not Jacqueline and Lee, but the really famous ones: Marge, Selma, and Patty)
—The blue-haired Bouviers prove that sisters can sound identical. Of course, it helps if the same person is actually providing the voice for both or all of you.
3. The Brontës
(Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) There were originally two more Brontë sisters, but life was hard in the early part of the nineteenth century, and they died young.
—Brilliant? Yes. Crazy? Almost definitely. They wrote story after story about imaginary worlds in teeny-tiny handwriting. On the other hand, TV hadn’t been invented yet, so what else were you going to do on a long winter’s evening?
4. The Bennet sisters
(Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia)
—If you’re a woman and you like to read, then you already know and love the Bennets. Elizabeth is always torn between loving her family and being deeply embarrassed by them—and if you don’t relate to that, you probably don’t have sisters. Or a family.
5. The Gorgon sisters
(Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale)
—Tough and mean, with hair that’ll take on any flatiron and win, these women-beasts redefine what it means to be female, and you’ve got to love them for that. From a distance.