The Western Coast

Probably only Doris Lessing captures the mystery of a young women's situation as well as Fox. Fox makes a novel of her biography. This allows her to explore the years _Borrowed Finery_ only sketched: her formative late teens, after a childhood of landing in the care of anyone who would take her. Her only support is the Left community in Hollywood, & kindly & quirky outcasts who exist by helping each other. This is in the last years of The Depression. Because she is pretty, she can usually find a meal when she is hungry. She lives as her childhood has taught her: she drifts along working at any arduous job she can find & living with any friend who will rent or give her space she can afford. There were not many paths open for a young woman, at the end of the 1930s, & the early 1940s. She marries a hypercritical philanderer who tells her he can structure her life & then abandons her. And she emerges strengthened through trial & freely admitted error. It's a sharp book: worth reading & re-reading.