“Oh and this woman. She would sit at this bar every night, wearing every piece of jewelry she owned, just waiting for her long lost love. I called her Madame Bijoux. See how her clothes are all moth eaten?”
I think it’s clear who is at the center of Renowned Playwright “Julia Houston’s” wardrobe inspiration dream board.
I have a lot of experience with lending libraries, and by lending libraries I mean libraries of books intended for honor system type swapping amongst a group of people. I however have always taken the “lending” element to a “consequence free regular library” place, aka, FREE BOOKS FOREVER! The first sixteen summers of my life or so were spent vacationing in some combination of Charlotte, Vermont (where my grandparents kept their boat), a rental house in Broadkill Beach, Delaware (where my dad spent summers as a kid), and Ocean View, New Jersey, (where my other grandmother lived). None of these really struck a “popular summer vacation destinations” chord among my fellow Massachusetts residents, who all went to Maine or Cape Cod, but they made sense to my family and were all, in one way or another, pretty remote. With the exception of the year I was twelve and had saddled myself with the enormous responsibility of not one but two Nano Babies to take care of (Pre Teen Virtual Mom!), we were pretty much cut off from all technology, including TV, and if there was TV, it wasn’t cable, and if there was a VCR available, odds were the only tape we had was Bright Eyes starring Shirley Temple. Hence, the lending library was key.
Just because it was the 90s and we didn’t have phones (of the cellular persuasion anyway), this isn’t meant to be some hyperbolic “hardship” anecdote where I talk about climbing up a hill both ways in the snow and not being fed if I misbehaved. I’ve got none of those. These vacations ruled, and it’s because of them that I have NOT ONLY lots of fun, water related memories, but also a section of my brain devoted to retaining information about the heady plots of a handful of Danielle Steel’s extensive anthology of books probably not intended for a fourteen-year-old. BUT C’EST LA VIE, THERE YOU HAVE IT: I read many Danielle Steel books as an adolescent. My parents were always very vigilant about the movies and television I consumed as a child, but they didn’t seem to care about the lack of YA novels at the Point Bay Marina lending library, so it was a fiction free for all. Thanks to this lending library (and the stack of paperbacks that the owners of the houses we’d rent were oh so considerate to stock the shelves with), I also dabbled in the non fiction worlds of Not Without My Daughter and a lovely book called Albatross. Albatross told the true story of a woman who barely survived a shipwreck and lived on a life raft for several days (weeks?) until she was rescued and wrote the book that recounted her tale and found its way to the lending library at a marina where people could enjoy a nice relaxing chapter of it before nodding off for the night ON THEIR BOAT. So when educating my twelve-year-old self about the perils of sharks and being an American women in a Muslim country started to get a little heavy, I subbed in the occasional Danielle Steel page turner for some fictional relief.
We all know Danielle Steel’s schtick. She looks like a Daytime Emmy contender, has a fleet of ghostwriters, a billion dollars, and writes books with insane plots that are very readable. However, at the time, all I saw were books with beautiful covers that literally had my name on them. I don’t know exactly how many I read, but I know which ones were particularly memorable, so memorable in fact, that I’m really just summarizing these complex plots based on memory alone, so forgive me if there are holes and/or spoilers, I guess, if you care about that sort of thing. Anyway, here they are, in no particular order:
Prior to Princess Diana’s devastating and untimely death by car wreck, Accident was my main truly grim Cautionary Tale About Drunk Driving and Lying To Your Parents About Where You are. Accident gets its title from - guess what - a grisly car accident that occurs when, in true Ted Kennedy style, the blackout drunk wife of a San Francisco politician crashes her death machine (read: car) into another vehicle, which happens to be containing our two main players’ daughters, best friends Allyson and Chloe (along with two other guys who don’t much matter to the story). Chloe’s ballerina dancing legs are broken forever and Allyson is launched into a coma. This story is obviously not about the teens, it’s about their parents, but clearly the teen element resonated best with me. Anyway, Danielle builds a phoenix from the ashes of despair when Allyson’s beside vigil dwelling mom falls in love with Chloe’s stoic Norwegian Viking Handsome Man dad, and the two of them combine their broken (figuratively and literally) families and live happily ever after, especially when Allyson wakes up from her coma!
Before I read the horrifying, non fiction, nation sweeping sensation known as A Child Called ‘It’, I read Danielle Steel’s fictional Mommy Dearest-times-a-billion child abuse missal, The Long Road Home. Just like Accident, The Long Road Home is a deliciously on the nose name, because this book’s heroine, Gabriella, walks along a hell of a long road of life that presents one dreadful obstacle after another. As a child growing up in a beautiful Manhattan brownstone, Gabriella’s mom is uhhhreal abusive and basically uses her as a punching bag while Gabriella’s father stands idly by, a pillar of weakness against his wife, who I always pictured as looking a lot like Cruella DeVil. Once Gabs escapes her hellish nightmare childhood, she GETS THEE TO A NUNNERY and promptly falls in love with some priest. When Gabriella gets knocked up by the priest, they make some kind of plan to run off together, but then Priest can’t live with what he’s done, so he kills himself. Then, of course, because Gabriella can’t catch a single break, she miscarries Baby Priest. Because she hasn’t had enough strife in her life at this point, she decides to go confront her father about why he let her mother terrorize her as a child, and obviously Pops has no good excuse because there isn’t one. I think this provides Gabriella with some sort of closure about the wrath of man, and then she goes off into the sunset down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Super uplifting.
I don’t remember as much about Malice as I do about the others, just that it’s about a girl named Grace whose mother dies, possibly from domestic violence related issues, because it’s important to note that Grace’s dad is a violently abusive alcoholic/rapist. This comes into play later on, shortly after Grace’s mom’s funeral, when Alcoholic Rapist Dad tries to molest Grace YET AGAIN. Unfortunately for him, Grace has finally had Enough (someone should make a movie called that!) and she snaps, killing him real good. Rapist Dad is vanquished once and for all, or he would be, EXCEPT Grace refuses to tell anyone, especially the judge and her lawyers, that she killed him in self defense and that he was a serial molester! So it’s off to jail for Miss Grace, where some pretty scary jail stuff goes down for her. Like, A&E Life Behind Bars type of shenanigans. It all starts to blur together for me post prison politics, but I’m sure she 
finally opens up about the horrors of her home life and gets released from the prison cell she could have avoided and probably falls in love with a man because hello, it’s a Steel, Steel world and we’re just living in it.
Oh, Fine Things. Fine Things indeed. Fine Things is a real life Cinderella Story with yet another all too punny and clever title. You see, the Prince Charming of this tale is a department store mogul (those were huge in the 80s, apparently) by the name of Bernard FINE (see what she did there?). Bernard Fine falls in love with Liz, a beautiful, harried divorcee that he meets when her little daughter Jane gets lost in his department store, which I’m going to take the liberty of saying is named Fine Things. Bernard and Liz get married and everyone is overjoyed. Bernard and Liz have a baby, and everyone is even more overjoyed. This is when Things become not so Fine, for shortly after Baby is born, Liz gets diagnosed with terminal cancer and dies almost instantly. Following Liz’s death, Jane’s deadbeat dad tries to come back into her life by kidnapping her and demanding ransom from Daddy Fine, but fortunately all that buffs out too, and Things return to their Fine status quo.
I tend to make my feelings about Titanic pretty clear, so it should come as no surprise that as soon as a post 1997 me caught a glimpse of a Danielle Steel book with a sinking Titanic on it, that thing was as good as read. Incidentally, you’ll notice that the sinking depicted on the cover of this book is pretty inaccurate, considering the bow sank first. Apparently Steely Dan doesn’t share the same eye for details as my friend James Cameron, but it’s also safe to say that she’s not exactly in this for the authenticity of it all. Anyway, The protagonist of No Greater Love, Edwina, is on her way back to America with her parents, cluster of siblings, and lovely fiance. Unfortunately, everyone but Edwina and the sibling cluster finds themselves one of the 1500 people that went into the sea. So Edwina is left to deal with all of this, a young sort of widow in an Edwardian world raising her sad siblings and dealing with her parents’ booming publishing company. The post sinking details have sadly gone the fuzzy way of the Malice post girl on girl prison rape details so all I really remember here is Edwina having some disciplinary issues with her youngest sister a la Lydia Bennett and then I’m sure she finds love once more, though it is no greater than the love she shared with Frozen Fiance.
Granny Dan, Granny Dan, Granny Dan. Granny Dan is my favoritest of them all because it combined a few of my favorite things as a fourteen-year-old: Ballet, the Romanovs, and stories about the past narrated from the present. Granny Dan herself dies in the beginning, an old old lady warm in her bed, and then her granddaughter discovers a box of letters and pointe shoes and from there is able to piece together what becomes the novel, which is about a beautiful Russian girl named Danina whose dad doesn’t know what to do with a girl so he does what I imagine a lot of Russian widowers did: he sends her off to live at the Russian Ballet. I thought this was a great solution, and Danina Ballerina became a pretty big deal in the world of Russian ballet, and got to kick it with the Grand Duchesses pretty regularly. SO regularly in fact, that when she went injured herself, one of the Grand Duchesses invited her to convalesce at the palace and enjoy the luxury of being cared for by a foxy Russian doctor whom she obviously falls in love with. Unfortunately, Foxy Russian Doctor is killed and Danina flees to America where she starts the boring life that eventually produces the granddaughter who catapulted the story into its retelling. The fact that the name Danina seemed like a perfect combination of the words “Danielle” and “Ballerina” may or may not have influenced my decision to adopt the AOL handle XxDaninaXx, which I wound up keeping through college until I entered the working world and decided that IMing a boss or coworker with a screen name that significantly resembled that of a sexbot was probably to be avoided.
The bottom line is, there’s fast food, and there’s KFC. There’s “romance novels”, and there’s Danielle Steel. Have I read them since I was in middle school? No. Do I wish I remembered other, more impressive, clouty books as well as I remember this tripe? Yes. Would I display a Danielle Steel anthology proudly on a book shelf in my living room for the world to see? Probably not. Similar to my childhood vision of a room in my future house dedicated to a proud display all of my American Girls and their accouterments, a Danielle Steel bookshelf is probably something best left to girls who have a parade of suitors knocking down their door every minute of the day and are looking for ways to deter some or all of them. I do not have that problem, so really, less is more in the Weird Girl Apartment Display category.
That said, if I woke up tomorrow in Afghanistan or on a raft having survived a shipwreck and had nothing to read and someone held out a copy of some sophisticated thinker’s book of poetry/physics or some other topic that would make me look and feel very smart in one hand, and a copy of any one of those bad boys up there in the other, I think it’s clear what my choice would be. It’d probably be the same as anyone’s, whether or not they’re willing to admit it. SO on that note, I should really mail some stuff back to a bunch of marinas in Vermont whose bookshelves have most likely been pretty barren since 1999.
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WOW GOOGLE.
For the record, I wasn’t trying to google how to sneakily do EITHER of those things.
On this Sunday’s episode of TLC’s My Strange Addiction, a lady confesses that she drinks “almost all of the urine that comes out of [her] body”. She drinks it the usual way (through the mouth) and also she neti-pots it into her throat via her nez and then she also drinks it through her eyes somehow, which I would find truly ridiculous and scientifically impossible had I not seen a TLC special where a man put a snake in his nose and let it come out of his eye, so I know all of the face holes are in fact connected somehow. Oh, she also likes to splash “aged urine” from Mason jars onto herself during and after baths, because it’s packed with skin enhancing nutrients and softening agents. PEE. She’s done this for years because she thinks it’s a cure for her MALIGNANT MELANOMA, which has manifested itself in the form of a color changing, shape shifting mole on her back. No doctors necessary though, we’re just going to go ahead with the Pee Drinking Regimen and that’ll be that. You can see the for yourself via this link, but it’s pretty disgusting so if you want to just take my word for it, I totally get it:
If you decided to skip the link, I’ll just clue you in on my Most Anticipated Moment of the show, when the Pee Drinker’s BFF comes over to hear the Big Confession and the Pee Drinker gives her a cup of tea. Uh, BFF? You might want to hold off on drinking that until you hear what Pee Drinker has to confess, and Pee Drinker, you might have the decency to, I don’t know, USE DISPOSABLE CUPS FOR YOUR GUESTS IF YOU’RE GOING TO FILL ALL OF YOUR GLASSES WITH PEE.
I’m pretty sure this is what happens when crazy hippie ladies spend too much time in the homeopathic medicine aisle of Whole Foods and get henna tattoos and drink too much kombucha while thinking really, really hard about how independent and spiritual they are. Kombucha, by the way, is the closest thing to pee anyone should ever drink unless they are one of a group of shipwreck surviving, barely alive castaways drifting aimlessly in the open sea with no fresh water in sight, nothing to eat but one other, and nothing to drink but THEIR PEE.
This is by far the most vile of all of the Strange Addictions, and I say this having seen all of them, INCLUDING but not limited to, a woman who drank tons of nail polish, a woman who ate rocks, a woman who ate cat food, a woman who ate Comet, and a man who was in an “intimate” relationship with his car.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, and I don’t know why I have a sheer, morbid curiosity towards the mental behavior of others, but I really do. My Strange Addiction is My Strange Addiction. However, this week I will DVR this episode and go see a production of Spring Awakening: The Musical on Sunday night instead, because I am not about to let My Strange Addiction control my life.
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Not that this is particularly fascinating or hilarious, but it just happened today and is the just one of a long history of times I’ve been flagrantly called Nicole at random over the years. It’s possible that this is the universe’s way of revealing my past life or alter ego or something, I don’t know, but this has been a very common random happening for most of this life. My elementary school art teacher even occasionally called me “Nikki”, so it was a really friendly and familiar complete misnomer. Sure, maybe Kevin here knows something I don’t, but what he probably doesn’t know is that in my head, his name is always screamed a la Catherine O’Hara in Home Alone 2.
