”Two years after the breakup
of her marriage to award-winning playwright Rudy Gendler, Dinah Kaufman remains
in limbo, not really wanting him back but lacking a satisfying stand-in. So,
idled by a writers' strike, she tails Rudy and his current love, the compliant
Lindsey, to the Hamptons. Dinah proves to be the prototypical ‘new woman’' in
her uncertainties and gender confusions; she finds it hard to relinquish the ‘pink’
girlish fantasy that a man will indeed secure her happiness ever after. She
knows she always seems to love men who later leave her, but understanding this
and changing her life for the better pose two distinctly different challenges.”
There are a lot of funny bits
in Surrender the Pink, the second novel Fisher wrote after the success of Postcards From the Edge. Dinah is smart, sarcastic, worldly, as well as sad. There
are some rather touching bits, as well, and I could help but not feel somewhat
connected to the character and the writer. I was also sort of stunned by an
exchange about women’s roles in society, and realize more so, that in the near
28 years since this book was released, nothing much has changed. I can see why
Carrie Fisher like gay men –they treated her with the respect and love she
needed.
This book, also, is long rumored
to be loosely based on Fisher’s relationship and short marriage to singer Paul
Simon. If it is, both come off fairly evenly here; Fisher does not seem to have
too much of an ax to grind. It does highlight, though, what a wonderful, witty woman Fisher was and what we lost when she so unexpectedly left us in 2016.
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