The Cherry in the Martini

by Rona Jaffe

Rona Jaffe’s memoir is abundant with personal insights on the joys and challenges of childhood and youth. Written in short autobiographical essays, Jaffe shares vivid memories of her first experiences of love and loss in her search to find her voice as both a woman and writer. Straightforward and unsentimental, Rona Jaffe’s memoir explores the complex emotions of adolescence into adulthood with an honesty that all readers will find welcoming and relatable.

128 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 2015

About the author

Rona Jaffe established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards program in 1995. It is the only national literary awards program of its kind dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively. Since the program began, the Foundation has awarded more than $850,000 to a total of 92 women.

Ms. Jaffe was the author of sixteen books, including Class Reunion, Family Secrets, The Road Taken, and The Room-Mating Season (2003). Her 1958 best-selling first novel, The Best of Everything, was reissued by Penguin in 2005.

Reviews

[Robert Jr. · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was so frickin’ bland! I read it because I was fascinated with her from reading (what else) Mazes & Monsters. It was so plain, so devoid of anything, so blank, that I became fascinated by it. Not too long ago, I remembered that I had seen some reviews of her other stuff and that a few people had enjoyed that work. So, I decided to give her another chance, especially when I found this book and found that it was autobiographical. Well, it was a quick read, it’s not like her structures or style are complex or anything like that.

The first chapter had built up a little narrative energy which kept me reading but this is instantly evaporated away as each chapter is an unrelated self-contained short story episode of her life, any momentum potential is gone when a chapter ends. And the book actually gets increasingly bland as you read through to the end. So much so, that the final chapter is told in the third person. It’s about her giving her husband an STD from her having an affair with a promiscuous married man. Had it been in first person like the rest of the book, it might’ve made a decent conclusion to the book, but no, she squandered that potential as well.

That is another thing about this memoir, it is palpably guarded. The author seems to want to talk about everything but clean it up so it’s not too embarrassing or too revealing. Her toeing the line makes it all just frustrating and boring. She comes off as a total prude whenever she talks about sex especially about the boys she was “in love” with in college, all of whom turned out to be “secret homosexuals”. One of the two points of interest in the book. The other is the first chapter’s childhood game of “Ritz Top Torture Academy”.

This book sucked just like Mazes & Monsters, its fragmented, Rona Jaffe’s prose is so utterly effaced of style and so dismally bland that it transcends vanilla becoming a monotone beige. Although, there is a single insight into her uninteresting method:

Some things in life you cannot ever change, and given the chance, with all the powers of a wicked and hungry mind, you do not want to change them, for as they are is the way they were meant to be. [pgs.148-149]

No wonder her characters are so static and one-dimensional.

I don’t care what anybody else thinks, I’m never touching another book or anything else bearing the name Rona Jaffe on it. I can only imagine that her best work is only mediocre. Hell, she barely even mentioned her writing, how these chapter-long episodes affected her work, or about any of her work up to the time of the book’s writing, just that she wanted to become a writer and became one; more than likely just to spite a doctor she was dating who didn’t like the idea of her being a writer at all. That’s it, the last bit of interest this book holds at all, it’s just plain boring.

I might be a little angry that I read this book.

[thtbrunettegirl · Rating 1 out of 5]

the fourth book i’ve read by her and by far the worst … dnfing half way through. This book is only about 150 pages long it should’ve taken me no more than a few days to read but i just couldn’t get through it, it is bland!