Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love

Gordon/Dawn was a fascinating character and this book is intriguing reading. Just who was Dawn? How much of her story was true and how much fiction? What is sex? What is gender? Like Middlesex this book is mind-expanding. The other reviews have explained the book itself, so I won't try to do so. But for those readers who'd like to find out more about Dawn, read "Me Pappoose Sitter" written by Dawn as Gordon, then read "She Crab Stew" written as Dawn. Both are absolutely hilarious, especially "She Crab Stew" which is unlike anything else I have ever read! Through these 2 books, I think that we can see more about Gordon/Dawn's inner self and life outlook in her own novels, than in this book. (Me Pappoose Sitter is semi-autobiographical, and She Crab Stew is a comic novel with a main character that seems to me to be Dawn's alter-ego.)

Edward Ball's unusual story of Dawn Langley Hall, set in the charming environs of Charleston, South Carolina, will absorb your interest and leave you still wanting answers to some of the questions it raises. Written in Ball's highly personal style, in which he injects his own thoughts and feelings into the narration, the book tells of Dawn's metamorphosis from his/her birth as a poor boy, son of a servant on a large English estate, to a society woman in Charleston. When Dawn marries a black man, she loses her position in Charleston circles. Later, when she purportedly gives birth to a daughter, she sets tongues wagging all over the city. Was she actually the mother of the baby as she claimed? This is just one of the questions that surround eccentric, enigmatic Dawn. This fascinating book, a biography of an extraordinarily colorful life, is highly recommended.

I finished reading this book over the weekend, and found it well written. Mr. Ball did not have an easy task of explaining the self-invention of its main character, and for the most part adopted a sympathetic but skeptical tone. This was the best way to approach this story. In 1969, when Gordon Hall underwent his transformation, and became Dawn, the whole scenario must have seemed jaw-dropping and too ridiculous for words. Even now, the whole story is incredible. And very, very sad.Gordon/Dawn, in his lifelong quest to attain a place in the world at first seems a strange blend of pathetic and quietly heroic. But my sympathy for him slowly evaporated as his story continued to unfold. This reader could not help but notice that when Gordon/Dawn latched on to Isabel Whitney and her fortune, it seemed to suit him well enough to be regarded as a man. Whitney?s legacy gave him a future of possibilities, and what did he do with it? This is laid out in the book in an even-handed manner. But at the end, the author could not avoid pointing out that for all the damage that Gordon/Dawn drew on himself, the real victims were the man he married and the daughter he ?bore?. Gordon/Dawn suffered a long and slow decline, but his suffering in no way atones for the fact that in his endless quest for attention, status, and even love, he used people flagrantly and without shame.What a despicable character. What a good book.

Charleston, South Carolina, is similar to a lot of southern cities in a description one of its citizens gave it: "Charleston is a city with Gothic tales, and what they don't know, they make up." The words are from Dawn Langley Hall Simmons, who had been Gordon Hall before a sex change operation, and no one in Charleston could have made up her story. It's far too weird. For Simmons was a well known Charlesonite, an expatriate Britton in a renovated town house who not only had changed from a man to a woman, but in 1969 married a black mechanic 25 years younger than she. Then she reported she was pregnant, and eventually produced a baby complete with birth certificate. This strange life gets a fascinating exposure in _Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love_ (Simon and Schuster) by Edward Ball. Ball has sifted through the extremely puzzling mysteries here, including the forty-three boxes of Dawn Simmons material kept by the library at Duke University. One of the most attractive features of this biography is that although it more-or-less tells Gordon's, then Dawn's, chronological story, it is a chronicle of how the author traced down leads, traveled to obscure locales that might have some memory of his subject, and interviewed some decidedly peculiar people who knew him / her. From initial bafflement to eventual understanding, a reader can join him on an illuminating journey.Ball went to Sissinghurst Castle in England to visit Nigel Nicolson, son of Vita Sackville-West. Strangely, Gordon Hall grew up around there; he was the son of Sissinghurst servants and himself helped weed the famous gardens around the estate. Gordon would grow up eventually to move to Canada where he would school the Ojibwa children in 1946, a year he would write about in _Me Papoose Sitter_. In 1952, as in so many stories of American self-invention, he arrived in New York City. Gordon Hall, a debonair young man conflicted about his sexuality, became an intimate of the elderly unmarried artist Isabel Whitney, one of the heirs within the cotton-gin Whitney family. Whitney died in 1962, and Hall inherited a large estate of stocks, antiques, and art. In Charleston he ingratiated himself to the Historic Charleston Foundation and other locals by finding an old downtown house to renovate and stuff with antiques. There are some questions about how the flamboyant Gordon Hall spent his nights, but eventually he met John-Paul Simmons, "a skinny, happy black guy who looked like he'd stumbled into a good time." And he fell hard for John-Paul, who wasn't interested in another man. Gordon was seen in the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins soon after it opened in 1966, and underwent surgery for transformation into womanhood. Charleston had been titillated by the change from Gordon to Dawn, but the change to Mrs. Simmons with the black husband was much harder to take. The wedding announcement ran on the local newspaper's obituary page.In 1971 w

This book has definitely kept my attention. It's a book that you read and then think about a whole lot. I can't say that it was a 'fun read' but it was enlightening and most interesting. It makes me want to read more from this author and I probably will.