Kin-Flicks
$ 8.00
Author: Lisa Alther
Publisher: Signet AE1985
Year: 1977 Print: 1 Cover Price: $3.95
Condition: Book Grades. Very Good Plus. Light wear
Genre: Fiction/Satire/Coming of Age/Feminist
Pages: 518
70126097
The narrative alternates between the present day in 1974 and extensive chronological flashbacks. In the present framework, 27-year-old Virginia "Ginny" Babcock returns to her hometown of Hullsport, Tennessee. She has been cast out by her husband, stripped of her maternal rights, and has returned to sit by the hospital bedside of her terminally ill mother.
While keeping vigil, Ginny reflects on her life, comparing her memories to the sanitized family home movies—or "kinflicks"—her mother used to record. The flashbacks chronicle Ginny's exhausting attempt to find her identity by adopting the extreme values and subcultures of the 1960s and 70s. Her transformations include:
- The High School Cheerleader: Dating a star jock and rebelling against her rigid, factory-owning father.
- The Motorcycle Moll: Hanging out at moonshine joints with a local greaser boyfriend.
- The Political Radical: Attending an elite Northern women's college and discarding her family's worldview
-
The Lesbian Communitarian: Fleeing to a militant feminist commune in Vermont with her lover, Eddy.
The Suburbia Housewife: Trying to fit into traditional domesticity with an straight-laced husband and Tupperware parties after tragedy strikes the commune.
As her mother succumbs to her illness, Ginny is forced to shed these cartoonish archetypes, confront the raw realities of life and death, and face an uncertain future as her own person.
