Across the Page: Creating Self (page 2)
by Heather Aimee O'Neill, December 5, 2006

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One of the more controversial aspects of Kate is Mann's deconstruction of the Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy myth. Though the relationship was deep and certainly loving, it was also entirely platonic.

Tracy was a tortured man who abused alcohol to cope with his family, religion, insomnia and sexuality. Like many of the men Hepburn was linked to, including her husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith (they separated shortly after their wedding), and Howard Hughes, Tracy “left behind rumors of sexual ambiguity.”

Hepburn spent her entire life with women, but after Tracy's death, she encouraged the idea that their relationship was intimate in part, Mann suggests, to protect her own ambiguous sexuality. Though the friendship had its troubles, Hepburn was Tracy 's faithful caretaker toward the end, and she resented competing with his wife.

Also, as Hepburn's sister Peg insightfully suggests, “If she could convince the world she'd had it [a great love affair], then maybe she could convince herself.” Either way, Hepburn turned the relationship into one that some say “ Tracy wouldn't recognize.”

By dismantling these myths, a far more interesting figure emerges in the pages of Kate. Mann takes on many of the previous biographers and even Hepburn herself. “Kate is cautious about flagrant exaggerations of the truth, spinning her takes through implication,” he writes. “But many of the facts in Me [Hepburn's memoir All About Me]are just plain wrong.”

What makes Kate such a compelling read, though, is not Mann's ability to set the record straight and identify the myths. It is his willingness to consider — critically and with admiration — both how and why they were constructed in the first place.

The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, by Judy Doenges (University of Michigan Press)

Judy Doenges' first novel, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, is a coming-of-age story set in a neglected Chicago suburb of the 1960s and '70s. Robin Simonsen loses her mother at a young age and is left with her father, a drug dealer-turned-user who can barely take care of himself. Though her grandmother, Goldie, manages to bring a maternal presence to the house, Robin is haunted by the memory of her mother.

As Robin grows up, she begins to question her sexuality. Doenges is at her best when writing about Robin's confusing attraction toward other girls and the grief she still carries for her mother, often blending the two extreme forces: “Since her mother's death, every connection Robin had to another person was like a splinter she had to remove; her own feelings for Kitty now shifted between love and hate, relief and pain, with each of her friend's even breaths.”

Though the themes in the book are poignant — angst, loss, longing — Doenges' language is far from maudlin or sentimental. Instead, Robin is a steady and sharp observer. Appropriately anxious over father's sorrow, “The land around Robin looked as flat as Columbus ' nightmare, flat enough for a grieving father to fall off and keep falling.” Her first crush emerges as she takes her “friend's hand to her chest like a hermit crab drawing food into its shell.” Later, she believes “her desire created her, just for misery and longing, just for emotions stretched as far as they could go.”

The Most Beautiful Girl in the World is an undeniably absorbing story, and Doenges is a trustworthy guide into the complex world of adolescence, family, love and desire.

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