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All the Pretty People: Tales of Carob, Shame, and Barbie-Envy
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This new book by Ariel Gore brings out all of the dirt on 1970s suburban hippies. Through an authentic voice, funny stories alternate between warming and saddening your soul. It's a queer love story. But it's also got no shortage of shame, violence, and Barbie envy. It's about the pretty people she used to know in California—the people she wanted to be but never quite felt
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Paperback, 144 pages
Published
May 1st 2011
by Lit Star Press
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Start your review of All the Pretty People: Tales of Carob, Shame, and Barbie-Envy

What a lovely little book this is, composed of adept vignettes that truly add up to something bigger. For anyone born in the late 70s, I think--especially for the alterna-kids of the left--there's such a sense here of feeling heard and seen, in all the ways we tried and failed to fit in, and in all the ways we forged our own identities in the absence of traditional parenting. There's so much beauty in these pages, and so much truth.
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Ariel Gore's memoir, Atlas of the Human Heart, is one of my favorite books ever, and this book complements it perfectly. Lots of brief glimpses into the life of young Ariel--funny, sad, sweet. Love it.
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I found this at Quimby's in Chicago. I'd buy anything Ariel Gore writes (as long as it isn't baby-centric).
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This is a collection of short essays about childhood into young womanhood, or as Ariel says "This is a book about all the pretty people I used to know in California." In it, she captures what it's like to have an eccentrically exotic mother who marries a priest and a father who's mental state is quickly unraveling, in spite of his stable, respectable, cocktails at 5 'o clock family. While she bounces back and forth between these two worlds trying to make some sense of it all, she nails the voice
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I love Ariel Gore's work. She's funny and can reveal the awkward discomfort of being human so well. This one is a collection of brief vignettes from childhood with illustrations.
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loved it so completely. brilliant glimpses of gore's california childhood.
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ARIEL GORE is the author of We Were Witches (The Feminist Press, 2017), The End of Eve (Hawthorne Books, 2014), and numerous other books on parenting, the novel The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, the memoir Atlas of the Human Heart, and the writer’s guide How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happi
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