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Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers by John Philip Drury

Original price was: $24.99.Current price is: $22.99.

 

Bobby and Carolyn is remarkable for its lyricism, its sharp focus, its empathy, and yes, for its rich comic ironies. It’s really unlike any memoir I’ve ever read. It’s the kindness of the book that strikes me. This is a memoir of songs and silences, of public and private performances. John Philip Drury uncovers in concise and beautiful prose the remarkable stories of the two mothers who raised him. A remarkable and jewel-like book.

–Stephen Kuusisto, author of Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey

 

An archivist of his mother’s secret and sometimes volatile love affair with a woman, an accomplished opera singer in the 1950s, John Philip Drury interviews people who knew them and mines press clippings, newspaper articles, diaries, photographs, letters, and a cassette recording of his mother on the piano accompanying the woman she loved. During voice lessons she taught, the opera singer “kept a big, round magnifying mirror on top of the upright [piano] so the student could see what his or her mouth was doing during the song.” Bobby and Carolyn is a kind of mirror, too, showing how the act of disclosure can be a form of love.

–Julia Koets, author of The Rib Joint: a memoir in essays

 

When poet John Philip Drury’s petite mother, Bobby, falls in love with voluptuous opera singer Carolyn Long, his father leaves to attempt his own singing career in New York City, and John grows up inside the tumultuous relationship of the two women. Opera programs, operatically slammed doors, Bobby’s work as a bank teller, Carolyn’s piano and music lessons in the living room, all become elements in the making of the young poet-to-be. Sumptuously detailed, written back-and-forth in time, Drury’s memoir examines his growing up with the kindness and perspective of a biographer. The lives of his mother and Carolyn (his erstwhile Auntie Mame) develop as luxuriously as voices taught to sing from the diaphragm. And Drury’s voice develops into its poetic richness, too. Their creative acts became his, and now he gives their pioneering lives to us in this splendid, fascinating memoir.

–Molly Peacock, author of Paradise, Piece by Piece and A Friend Sails in on a Poem

 

 

 

 

 

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Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers

by John Philip Drury

Full-length, Paper

$22.99  List: $24.99

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This title will be released on August 9, 2024

Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers focuses on the author’s mother and the “glamorous soprano” who came between his parents when he was eight years old. They both fell in love with her, but Carolyn Long and his mother, whose nickname was Bobby, ended up together, sharing a life and what they secretly considered a marriage, having exchanged vows on a moonlit night in the summer of 1958. This memoir celebrates the do-it-yourself union between two women: a housewife who became a bank teller and a professional singer who became a voice teacher. It endured until one partner’s death in 1991—memorialized by the cemetery plot they share, with their names engraved on opposite sides of the tombstone, just like the names of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Their life together was turbulent, partly because of their volatile personalities (and it took volatility to make such a leap of faith into forbidden love in the Fifties), partly because of prejudice against same-sex relationships, so they had to call themselves “cousins” in order to rent an apartment or a house together. Although the author grew up with the two women and considered Carolyn more of a parent than his father, he didn’t discover the true nature of their tumultuous relationship until both women had died and left clues for him to find in their diaries and notes.

John Philip Drury is the author of six collections of poetry: The Stray Ghost (a chapbook-length sequence), The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies. He has also written Creating Poetry and The Poetry Dictionary. His awards include an Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, two Ohio Arts Council grants, a Pushcart Prize, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.

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