Remembering Jody

by Randy Sue Coburn

Randy Sue Coburn's wise first novel takes on the twin challenges of love and mental illness. Marsha Rose, a freelance writer spending a summer in Seattle with her artist lover, looks out her window... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786705663
• ISBN13: 9780786705665
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A dense first novel abou time and memory...

Coburn has written a dense first novel about time and memory and the disjunction between past and present, between reality and memory. At its heart, Remembering Jody is a tale of a lost Eden before the eruption of guilt. Dr. Thrailkill, the psychiatrist who treats Jody in Seattle implies the loss of innocence when he remarks to Marsha: "If you mean will he [Jody] ever be who he was before he became ill...." The Diaspora and assimilation form two of the subtextual threads binding this novel together. Almost Biblical in its examination of human weakness, Coburn's work tackles the hard questions of family, duty, love, sex, and belonging. Marsha Rose, the narrator, wants desperately for Jody, her childhood friend and onetime lover to belong, to be home, but the powerful split between past and present can't be overcome so she creates her own Jody in her head: "I told him anyway, in my head, where I could address a grown-up Jody of my own invention: I've lived there a long time, but it's not really home, either..." As with all Odysseys, Remembering Jody, tells two stories. The narrator's inner journey of discovery is wrapped within the physical journey of a road story. The near-fusion of the protagonist, Marsha, and her catalyst, Jody, could not be clearer: "I'm holding his hand because at this moment, he hardly seems separate from me at all." Because Jody doesn't know where he belongs, Marsha escorts him home. In an allegorical passage that speaks to the inner and the outer journeys, Jody tells Marsha the story of the boy, Richard, who stowed away on a plane in Australia so that he might get to Paris: "The coolest thing is that he'd never been to Paris before in his life, but he knew that was where he belonged." Here the author's technique at blending the inner and the outer tales is unmatched. At the conclusion of the novel, Jody returns to his safe haven, but not without having an effect on those around him: "...his reentry into our lives over the next few days made us all seem kind of inside-out, seams showing and threads unraveling in ways that were, for a change, fairly obvious."

Coburn reminisces: coming of age in America's Deep South.

A reminiscence about a Jewish girl's coming of age in America's Deep South narrated by witty wordsmith Marsha Rose: "I work part-time in a bookstore. I still don't have a Jewish boyfriend, but while this seems to bother Aunt Eileen, my mother takes the tack of treating Jimbo [the unapproved boyfriend] as if he's a style I will eventually outgrow." The narrator is called "Mashie" by her childhood chum Jody Lurrey, a paranoid schizophrenic who invades Marsha's adult life in Seattle, re-surfacing from semi-happy childhood days to heap heavy guilt upon the narrator's writerly shoulders thereby launching two trips that form the zigzag double helix spine of the book: Trip One is the real-time airplane return to mythical Sparta, the Deep South landscape which triggers Trip Two -- a series of memory dives into the narrator's past, where Marsha/Mashie relives indelible moments of personal history with her eccentric childhood buddy: horseback riding, swimming, smoking marijuana, climbing into bed, having sex, flipping out. Remembering Jody is a solid first-novel debut for Coburn, a free-lance journalist and screenwriter.

John Marshall in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Coburn has produced a heartfelt, tightly paced first novel in which two childhood friends must confront their past after a decade apart. Shifting back-and-forth in time and locales (the South, Seattle), "Remembering Jody" examines such powerful plot themes as love and friendship, guilt and responsibility, madness and family.

Librarian recommends this first novel

As a librarian who reads hundreds of pre-publication first novels, I was extremely impressed with this absorbing book. In the space of very few pages, Coburn ably handles several major characters, drawing the reader into their lives. Best of all, the portrait of Southern Jews in a small city is true-to-life. Having spent time in the Jewish community of a place very much like the fictional Sparta, this book made me feel I was back there again. Readers who enjoy reading Kaye Gibbons, Ann Hood or Anna Quindlen will savor this story of relationships. I'm eagerly looking forward to Coburn's next novel.