Glory Goes and Gets Some by Emily Carter

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The linked short stories in this fiction debut bring forth an unsparing, yet triumphant look at life through the eyes of a young woman confronting life as an HIV-positive addict in recovery. Carter, the daughter of writer Anne Roiphe, has penned a deeply felt, sharply perceptive work about the trials of leaving a destructive life behind and forging a new one-full of fear, prejudice, and often surrounded by failure.

Glory B., the daughter of wealthy New Yorkers, finds herself newly out of rehab, taking baby steps to put her life back together within a community of similarly recovering folks. Alternately brazen, dark humored, vulnerable, and depressed, Glory is the real thing-and meeting her again and again in these stories snaps into focus the perilous life her rebellious nature has bought. In school, she wore "spandex bridge-and- tunnel disco outfits. My mother said that I was disguising myself as a member of the working class in order to denigrate everything she and our culture stood for." From nursery school on, Glory craved men's love and approval. And she chooses the wrong ones: "I'm a human car accident… what it looks like after a train wreck. I'm the dictionary definition of sadness. Baby, I'm your man." Against her own best instincts, Glory continues to act out, desperate for attention. And as a result, she finds herself spinning out of the elusive control she seeks. A paean to the 12-step recovery pro-cess, despite Glory's often dire circumstances, there is something in Glory Goes and Gets Some for everyone. Uncensored, ruthlessly honest, sardonically funny, and astutely observant, Emily Carter's is a debut to be heralded.

From the Publisher

How is a woman in her thirties, HIV-positive and fresh out of rehab, supposed to find love and work in contemporary, urban America, steering clear of self-pity and doctrinaire "happy-talk"? This linked short story collection shows how Glory goes and gets some.

Emily Carter's debut traces Glorys stay in Minnesota's recovery community, from halfway houses in blighted urban neighborhoods to well-funded treatment centers in bucolic pastures. From her addictions to heroin and alcohol in New York through her unlikely, tenuous, yet rewarding alliances with the full range of treatment mavens in the midwest, Glory gives us an uncensored and irreverent account of her experiences in twelve-step recoverya process that, for all its faults, ultimately works for her. That first six months, there were an awful lot of people I met who talked the talk, all the time. Their faces seemed to glow, and they'd go on about so-and-so "getting it, getting the program," having that much-touted aura of serenity about them. It was my experience that such persons usually relapsed and stole their roommate's stereo equipment, or charged five thousand dollars worth of lingerie at Neiman Marcus.

Glory Goes and Gets Some is a streetwise and sardonic look at sex, HIV, addiction, and recovery.

Emily Carter's work has received many awards and fellowships, including the Loft/McKnight Award, a Bush Grant, and a National Magazine Award. Her writing has appeared in Story Magazine, Gathering of the Tribes, Between C & D, Artforum, Open City, Great River Review, and Poz Magazine, for which she was the cover subject of the 1998 summer fiction issue. Glory Goes and GetsSome features stories that were originally published in The New Yorker, and the title story was selected by Garrison Keillor for Best American Short Stories 1997. Emily Carter lives in Minneapolis.

Publishers Weekly

An intense, edgy, boldly candid and irrepressibly sardonic voice drives the 21 interlinked stories in this collection, mainly narrated by the eponymous Gloria Bronski. Exiled from Manhattan to a recovery community in Minnesota, Glory minces no words in confessing that she is a former drug addict and alcoholic. She's also HIV positive (from a liaison with a Puerto Rican air-conditioner repairman), chronically depressed, and aching for sex, love and connection. The self-described "Jewish child of professional intellectuals," she announces her obsessive neediness for approval ("my disgusting need to be liked")-- especially by men. Glory is one of those characters who grab hold of your elbow and pour out their heart in nonstop talk. Her monologues pulse with irony and black humor; constantly cracking wise, she betrays her vulnerability only obliquely. Time and again, Glory's self-destructive behavior--in East Coast private schools, from which she is expelled, and in the streets and bedrooms of seamy New York neighborhoods--testifies to her paradoxical temptation to act badly, even when she's close to rock-bottom. Perversely, she rebuffs her family's love and concern--but not their money, which always rescues her. In the story "The Bride," she admits that "males have always had incredible power over me.... From nursery school on, I craved their love and approval in the way I would later come to crave alcohol, cocaine, and opiates." But after brief spurts of chemically induced euphoria, all she has earned is a lifetime of sadness. As she progresses through Minnesota's treatment centers, however, Glory does achieve recovery, and the tender, burgeoning possibility of a hopeful life. Carter's stories are best when Glory's voice has center stage; the several third-person narratives lack the ring of authority. But her prose is everywhere supple and compelling, and this collection announces her as a brave new talent. (Sept.) FYI: Carter's literary credentials are impressive; she is the daughter of writer Anne Roiphe and the sister of Katie Roiphe. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Addiction, AIDS, rehab--sounds grim. However, Carter rises above the subject matter and writes in a wholly original voice that is equally irreverent, moving, sardonic, and sad. In this series of linked stories, some of which were originally published in The New Yorker, the author pieces together the chapters of her heroine's life, from Glory's childhood to her stay in treatment centers to her brief period of happiness. In one of the stories, Glory answers the question, "I'm HIV-positive, who will have sex with me?" by placing a personal ad in a magazine called Positive People. Glory knows her weaknesses and is frank and open about her bad decisions: "From nursery school on, I craved [men's] love and approval in the way I would later come to crave alcohol, cocaine and opiates." Carter shows what it is like to live the life of a knowing yet troubled woman today without passing judgment on her character. All public libraries should "go and get some."--Yvette Olson, City University Lib., Renton, WA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

New York Times Book Review - Kantor

...whatever medium she chooses, and whether she speaks through an invented voice or her own, Carter's voice is welcome, and one can only hope that she will speak up again sometime soon.

Ms. Magazine - Chelsea Cain

Outrageous and compelling...Carter is an immensely gifted writer with a voice that is fresh and unapologetic.

Lambda Book Report

Emily Carter's debut collection of short stories is one of the most impressive to date.

Kirkus Reviews

Always interesting and sometimes dazzling, a collection of stories and fragments from the life of a self-destructive upper-middle-class bad girl. Carter grew up in a privileged Upper East Side home, the daughter of feminist writer Anne Roiphe, and proceeded to explore other options, ending up an HIV-positive recovering junkie. Presumably autobiographical, these linked pieces about a recovering addict named Glory, set largely in New York City and Minneapolis (the addiction and recovery capitals of the nation, respectively), display an intimate and knowing familiarity with the life of the addict and the rehabs and 12-step groups it leads to. While the many short riffs, exercises in voice and mood—like the remarkable "East on Houston," in which a young girl floats across Manhattan's Houston Street, borne on the voices of men reaching out to caress or assault—are hit-and-miss, the longer, more developed stories give the collection its real strength. Carter's eye for detail and ear for the rhetoric of recovery, her feel for people trying to make sense of their lives, turn what could be amusing glosses into moving portraits. In "Parachute Silk," Glory rejects the awkward advances of a recovering friend, sending him back to the comforts of his drug of choice. In "Zemecki's Cat," a recovering addict a few years sober walks through an austere and lonely life (his last girlfriend left a cat behind, with a note: "Here. Practice on this"), until circumstances open him to something like love. In the book's centerpiece, "The Bride," a telescoped memoir of searching unhappiness, Glory's mother, a swooning feminist, teaches hertolook to men for definition, and Glory comes to see herself as the Bride of Frankenstein, fit only for the monstrous, misunderstood outcast, until a recovery epiphany born of a near suicide reveals to her her own humanity. Uneven, but Carter's humor, insight, and lyricism win out over occasionally self-indulgent, obvious, or familiar moments.

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

EAST ON HOUSTON

There was this one summer that began in June and ended quite some time later, when I could hear the voices of men in traffic, while I was walking east on Houston. They honked and squealed, barked, drawled, groaned, purred, hissed, whispered, and raggedly begged at me as I twitched down the street in a borrowed dress that was as red as the stoplights, the stoplights gleaming in the black air like costume jewelry from a sunken Spanish galleon, gleaming from the bottom of the sea: the night on Houston like a black tropical shipwreck ocean, fathoms deep and full of trinkets for a young girl like yours-ever-true.

    Their voices glittered like tossed beer cans on traffic islands and said, Excuse me Miss, excuse me, can I walk you? Excuse me, excuse me Miss, those are some fine young thighs you're sliding along on there, with that creamy swish-swish, sweet, like my wife's when she was still walking. If I call her collect this one last—I'm going to tell her this time that I really mean it, this time, she'll forget about all the hours that piled up like stale blankets until she couldn't get out of bed, and we'll go to that place in Sheepshead, we'll go to that place that serves that crab with the butter sauce you could just about make love to, and you've got those exact same thighs, Miss, just slow them down a little because I'll tell you what, you haven't seen anything yet.

    Their voices reflected me in pieces of what they saw, like shattered Christmas ornaments on the sand in July: Excuse me Miss. You can stop can't you, you canspare one second, can't you? Can't you, you little cunt? You little stuck-up cunt? Think it's made of gold or what? All you cunts—don't even care what it was a man used to do for you, it's all what can you do for me right now. From watching too much television, that right-now thing—you've even got it in your walk, you walk like "right-now, right-now" ... you don't care, do you, what I used ... I used to ... I used to know the first four hundred pages of the Iliad by heart, memorized, I could quote it from memory, fine, fine, keep walkin', you ugly at any rate.

    Do I remember what it was exactly I was walking into when I was walking east on that particular street? Nothing good, but listen, the voices of men lifted me like a murmuring tide and floated me down toward the river, me with my eyeliner making my eyes black and green, smeared, shaped like tears, like black and green chalk-drawing eyes running in the rain.

    I was moist, like the sky before a shower, and the voices of men clamored to me like a summer thunderstorm—Excuse me Miss, they cracked, they lit up the sky, Excuse me Miss, but I'm a jazz musician. They blew around me like a light breeze. Excuse me Miss, but do you know how to get to that little place on the end of First and A? What I mean is, I feel a little awkward in this neighborhood, and I'd like to bring something back to show my friends, something I could give a bath and brush its hair, something to lick like a sweet poison plum, something that would climb out my fire escape in the morning and never ask to see my bank statement—I heard them say things like that. Excuse me Miss, but I'm a jazz musician. I heard them clacking their knees together, heard them say, Excuse me Miss, I'm tired and I'm no longer a young stud by any means, but if I could touch the hollow of your ankle, if I could just once see it filled with rainwater, I'd smile like a wolf and bring you something wrestled from the concrete with my bare hands, my hands stained yellow with cigarettes and strength—hell, I'd wrestle the lights off the Chrysler building if you'd just let me look at it, even though I have no teeth.

    And that guy, who was always there, with his broken instrument: Excuse me Miss, but I'm a jazz, excuse me, excuse me Miss, but I used to play with Parker, Miss, excuse me, but I'm a jazz musician, and I'm talking to you ... I heard them say it, their voices twining around, through the pointed scrawny leaves of the plane trees, around the twigs and paper cups at my feet: Excuse me Miss, but my mother was a knife-sharp, slender blue dragon, she spat white hot fire from her eyes, like lasers, and her teeth were shaped like needles, twelve feet long, her scales like sapphires; when she flew overhead she cast a shadow across the face of the sun, her talons were made of black steel, and she would have called you a bitch because you won't talk to me, Miss.

It seems to me now like I had been on roller skates, young enough to slide in and out of traffic, in between taxis and trucks. But I knew what I was walking into, and what I was listening for all along, and how after I heard it I couldn't hear much of anything else for a long time. I don't want to go back there. I only ever think about it when I hear the sound of screeching brakes.