Some People Just Shouldn't Be Around Children
Categories: In the News , Parenting & Families , Fiction
I'm trying to find a connection between two books I've read lately, Running Away With Frannie, by Renée Manfredi, and Un seul crime, l'amour, by Mary Fualaau (formerly Mary Kay LeTourneau) and Vili Fualaau, with a couple guest chapters by Vili's mother, Soona Fualaau.
I can't talk too much about Manfredi's strange and memorable novel without giving away the plot, which takes an unexpected turn about halfway through, and then another one at the end. The protagonist is Sam, a 25 year old from a household without a lot of money, one of ten siblings with an alcoholic father and a mother who works in an Elvis-Presley commemorative-plate-making factory. The mother expresses her opinion of dinner guests through her table settings. If the visitor gets a young-and-healthy Elvis plate, the mother likes the guest. Old washed-up Elvis means Sam's mother is not amused.
Sam's girlfriend Frannie gets the plate with the most bloated Elvis ever to ornament fine china. Though not a particularly sympathetic character, Sam's mother may have a point about Frannie. Sam met Frannie, for example, just before she was fired from her waitressing job for clogging the men's-room toilet by flushing down a potato.
Still, Frannie is beautiful and often very sweet, and Sam and Frannie end up living together in a randomly chosen town near Chapel Hill. She's estranged from the rest of her family but loves and cares for her mentally unstable brother. It's never clear why she flushed the potato. Sam speculates only that his life would have been very different if Frannie had chosen a smaller, flushable potato. In a less obvious way than Frannie, Sam has his own emotional difficulties. His pattern in life so far has been to live at home in Pittsburgh and work for awhile, and then, without warning, to take off in the night for a completely new city. Until meeting Frannie, he's always ended up back home, pulled by bonds to his large family.
When Sam's father dies, Sam learns a few family secrets, one of which is that his father, far from being poor, has given huge amounts of money to medical charities over the years. Sam's reaction is anger at his father for putting these charities over the needs of his own large family, who went without even the minor luxuries in life. The book is about the ties of family, and about the limits--if there are or should be any--of responsibility to family.
Un seul crime, l'amour is concerned with other questions than family responsibility, but the fact is that Mary Fualaau did basically abandon her four children (although they're apparently on good terms now) by her first husband for seven years in prison and a life with Vili and their two children. The book, which unfairly gets very bad reviews on Amazon.com, has an odd history. Written in English, it was translated into French and languages including Japanese and Finnish. The given reason that the book never appeared in English is that it reveals the name of one of Mary Kay's husband's girlfriends, and nobody wants the girlfriend's husband to be hurt. How likely is this? IF YOU LIVE IN SEATTLE AND ARE MARRIED TO SOMEONE NAMED LISA, YOU SHOULD TALK TO HER ABOUT THIS.
The French isn't difficult--Un seul crime would be a good high-interest / low-vocabulary choice for an intermediate French class (though perhaps not in middle schools) and is full of quirky details. After Mary Kay and Vili had become lovers, she tried to convince her husband to let Vili accompany them on a family vacation to Alaska. She was genuinely outraged that Steve refused: she believed Vili to be a gifted artist (which is true--some of his drawings are reproduced in the book) who would benefit from a visit to a new kind of landscape. Vili's mother Soona, while shocked at Mary Kay's relationship with 13-year-old Vili, is even more angry when the police become involved. "In the Samoan community," she says ominously, "We keep secrets like this to ourselves, for years if necessary." Vili is offended when Mary Kay sees him after her first prison sojourn and laughs at his gangster-style clothes. Mary Kay rejects her psychiatrists' diagnosis of narcissism but admits to perhaps a touch of "hypomania."
Frannie, finally, seems to suffer from something more than hypomania, but the fictional Frannie and the real Mary Kay have both sadly succeeding in distancing themselves from important parts of their families.
