The Bare Necessities—Karen Abbott (AMERICAN ROSE)

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.

Karen Abbott is the author of Sin in the Second City and American Rose: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee, a fantastic biography of “the most private public woman in the world.” American Rose reads like a striptease as Abbott slowly reveals several parts of the story of this woman who is “as fascinating as she is timeless.” I adore Abbott’s stories about bawdy women in history, and I’m thrilled that she’s here today with her Bare Necessities.

My background is in journalism, so I spent the first eight years of my career writing about people and places in the present. I followed Kobe Bryant during his rookie year with the Lakers, hung out with Philly’s erstwhile mob boss, “Skinny Joey” Merlino, and—strangest of all—befriended a trailer park-dwelling divorced mother of two who penned a how-to murder manual. But when my grandmother relayed a tale about an aunt who disappeared in Chicago in 1905, I immersed myself in the past and have dwelled there happily ever since.

My contemporary novelist friends talk about the importance of place in crafting a book’s mood, and for me, as a writer of historical narrative nonfiction, this translates into investigating every aspect of the time period—from the proper method of donning a corset, to the weight requirements of early burlesque performers, to the clandestine marketing methods of Prohibition-era speakeasies. I always appreciate a book that pays meticulous attention to historical detail, and here’s a selection of my favorites:

Paris Trout by Pete Dexter, published by Random House.
I’ve been a fan of Pete Dexter’s since my journalism days. Back in the 1980s, Dexter had been a Philly journalist himself, writing a popular column for the Philadelphia Daily News that evoked the city’s nuances and idiosyncrasies with such brutal, pinpoint honesty that he nearly was killed on the job by a furious mob of baseball bat-wielding thugs. After that incident Dexter turned to fiction, and Paris Trout—the winner of the 1988 National Book Award—is one of my top ten favorite novels of all time. Set in Cotton Point, Georgia in the 1949, Paris Trout opens with the title character, a respected white businessman, fatally shooting a 14-year-old black girl, and then examines the myriad ways this crime gnaws away at the social fabric and denizens of this small town. Dexter has a note-perfect ear for dialogue and local idioms that never patronize or veer into cliché, perhaps since his knowledge of the time and place was gleaned firsthand; he spent part of his childhood in Milledgeville, Georgia (the real “Cotton Point”) and this horrific crime was one of his earliest memories.   Read more