Post #24 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
Review by Tracy Kauffman Wood
Jerramy Fine is a born princess. She believes this at four, fourteen and still at twenty-four. In fact she spends most of her young life tracking the steps of her future prince. At six years old, she chooses a son of the Windsor family, the English royal Peter Phillips born the same year as she. Her quest becomes no less than to live happily ever after with him at Buckingham Palace. In her memoir, Someday My Prince Will Come, Jerramy Fine shares her modern-day take on the Cinderella story.
The princess fantasy is one many girls of four or five cling to, but as Jerramy grows so does her dream. She becomes an Anglophile and a fan of all royalty, pomp and circumstance. After an attempt to contact Peter at age 21, she receives a reply written instead from his mother’s private secretary. She is undaunted. She says,
“I carefully folded the letter and gently placed it back inside the royal envelope – calm as calm can be. And why shouldn’t I have been? Not only had I received two well-thought-out paragraphs instead of two formulaic lines, but they had been personally composed by my future mother-in-law’s private secretary –not some lowly assistant. Not only that, but it was clear that my future mother-in-law’s private secretary liked me. And I knew it wouldn’t be long before I had the entire royal household on my side.”
This is a girl poised for her date with destiny, bound and determined to claim her crown, or at least a posh English postal code. In this memoir of a wannabe princess, memoir writers should take note of the spunky and self-confident voice, the on-target recounted dialogue and the amusing and revealing comparisons throughout the book, between the life to which she was born (the child of hippies in a Colorado rodeo town,) and the royal life to which she aspires.
For example in her post-college romp through English high-society, Jerramy finds the English playboys to be as equally disappointing as her hometown Colorado cowboys, even though the former are Hugh Grant look-alikes. Here she recounts the conclusion of her evening with ‘Fergus’.
“I shall ring you tomorrow, Miss Fine. And I shall take you to my favorite pub in London.” We kissed again. “And then I will take you away for the weekend.” We kissed again and I closed the door.
That was the last time I saw Fergus.
In comparison, here is her description of his Colorado counterpart currently working at Wal-Mart.
“You’re goin’ da London? Wow. That’s in France, right?” Then the guy would spit a wad of chewing tobacco into the used Dr Pepper can he kept hidden under the cash register.
Throughout her quest, Jerramy’s relationship with her parents remains strong and stalwart. And even though their new age choices are at odds with her preference for old world charms, she comes to appreciate the freedom and openness they have given her to find herself.
“Now, Jerramy,” my mom continued, “when you get to college, go ahead and experiment with drugs if you feel you need to. But please- please don’t start drinking.”
It wasn’t long before my dorm room cocktail parties were legendary.
A girl’s got to rebel somehow.
Certainly Jerramy Fine convinces the reader in this fun jaunt through the American and English pastoral, that obsession can be a valuable compass along one’s journey toward wholeness.
Tracy is a professional photographer and is currently writing a memoir. You can follow her at: http://www.whocanstopadream.blogspot.com/
