Fossilized Valor

Looking For Mr. Goodbar has to be studied when it is passed around on the small screen, as there is little other way to view it in the present tense. I cannot compete with Ebert's pique at Richard Brooks. I was too young, and though my mother let me into a hedonistic and disturbingly subversive world as a tantrum throwing evil coming of age tyrant I was (Milkman and his passive mother in Morrison's daddy novel imprinted on my psyche in a bad way: I was too young for Solomon even though my rereading of the novel was immediate and intense as an upperclassman), she kept the gate closed on Judith Rossner, with good reason, as I am now haunted by Theresa Dunn, I knew Goodbar as a cultural marker in my younger days, but wasn't literate as to what these markers truly entailed, and now that I am, I have to go back and read the novel. Brooks may have distorted Rossner's story, but the masochistic elements remain, a rotten egg transliterating anger into bad behavior, even if Keaton does obscure Theresa's more destructive triggers: Did I self-consciously want to die when I defied my father and Jerry, my surrogate authority figure who abandoned me (!), according to my inner child (I knew he didn't but my solution to this emotional need to cleave to this Irish Shakespearean was to flee, and no, I am not over it, though he looks like Gandalf today and I am Roseanne Barr who cannot afford veneers) and moved into the inner city?

I almost succeeded. And it takes a great deal of courage to look as closely and boldly as Rossner did in her investigation. She opened the flood gates, with nary a closure in sight. For myself, I may have the courage, but was never a long form fiction writer. My story that fictionalizes my assault is stark, and highly prejudicial. A former farmer friend named Jack suggested "I tone it down," and did, but I let the main character have my anger, and run with it. My conceptualization of its arc is the most difficult literary motif I've ever envisioned.