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Second Printing
July 11,2010
From Winston-Higgins Press
Softcover ISBN 978-0-9826140-3-7
E-book ISBN 978-0-9826140-4-4
1st Place Florida Writers Association Literary Award 2010 (Women’s Fiction)
SYNOPSIS
Help! I think I’m turning into my mother!
College senior Eve Roberts is dumped by her boyfriend and, with nowhere else to go,returns home to her mother for comfort. What was she thinking? They agreed to spend a weekend on a Florida beach contemplating rum drinks, men, and bathing suits, but the tension in their relationship mounts as Eve’s mother can’t stop giving advice. They trace their shared struggles back through five generations of O’Malley women and conclude that every daughter lives a trilogy – her own story intertwined with her mother’s and her grandmother’s — and Eve learns that growing up to be like her mother might not be so bad after all.
Set on a Florida beach over a long weekend, The O’Malley Trilogy explores the nature of the mother-daughter bond, its inevitabilities and its creative possibilities. It gives hope and insight into the mother/daughter dilemma.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Women of all ages will find truth in The O’Malley Trilogy, as it explores the many roles that women play. But the family issues explored in The O’Malley Trilogy transcend the sex of the family members; its themes of parental separation, adolescent identity, middle-age crisis, romantic attachment and parenting are universal. It explores the patterns and experiences that are handed down from generation to generation, irrevocably changing the course of a daughter’s life.
EXCERPT
DAUGHTER
I just wanted to get out of there and get on the road. By the time my mother was ready and we finally put our bags in the car, it was raining. It was a slow kind of drizzle, one that picked up its intensity in waves like the sadness that I’d been feeling. One minute I hardly noticed it was there, and the next I was deaf with the noise, pelleted by the force and soaked to the skin.
I felt like I had lived a lifetime in the week after Dennis left. At first I was frantic, half-energized with freedom, and half-crazed from its sudden and unpredicted arrival. The struggle was over — the constant negotiation of the day to day, the concessions over the future — but I had no clue as to why he stopped fighting. It was a war neither of us won, but he at least had the satisfaction of retreat. This was his strategy that we were enacting, and I didn’t like it. I was left on the fighting field, looking in all directions, like, “Which way did he go?”
As the week wore on, I realized I could barely see myself out of context of the relationship. We were together four years, four of my most important years so far. Years where I figured out how to describe myself, what I wanted from the relationship, and who I could be. Years that I learned how to trust, how to give, how to let myself be loved by a man. Years during which, from a girl, I became a woman. We lived those years together, inside of each other’s lives and ambitions, sharing every random thought and experience. Having fun and being silly, developing our rituals and routines.
I was left wondering if it was all a dream, a delusion on my part. Was I blind to reality, living some kind of storybook experience? How long had he been unhappy? Had I known it deep down? Or if not, why not? How could I have been so stupid as to think that my love and hopes were mutual? My fascination with these questions was more than curiosity; the answers, I knew, would define my future.
MOTHER
There was an old photograph in my grandmother’s room while I was growing up. It was sepia-toned and quite small, maybe two inches by four inches. She kept it in a little gold frame on the round table with a doily on it. It was my job to dust her room, which was the smallest bedroom in our four-bedroom house. As a child, I hardly noticed the photo, but after she died, I took it and kept it.
She didn’t have any other photos on display. No pictures of my grandfather, who’d died before I could know him, or of any of her children or family. In fact, she had no other photos at all, anywhere in her possession.
This was a photograph of my grandmother and two friends on the beach in Atlantic City. I look at it now from time to time and wonder, who were these people? And what made my grandmother smile? She rarely smiled. The only memory I have of her laughing was the time we all tried to say, “rubber buggy bumpers” three times fast. And when my mother came into the room eager to join in the fun, Granmom stopped laughing and told us children to keep our voices down because she had a headache. We did as she said. My mother left, disappointed. Gran was always doing that, telling us to shut up when she could hear us having fun.
But in the photo, my smiling grandmother was lying on her side, propped up on her elbow in an old-fashioned black outfit that covered her whole body. She wasn’t young in the photo, but she wasn’t as old as I remember her, either. Most likely she was in her forties, and she was glad to be away from her children, away on her own. Most likely, she was drunk. That made her happy.
