FREE: Looking for Atlanta (paperback)

The listing, Looking for Atlanta (paperback) has ended.

Author: Marilyn Dorn Staats

The listing is for one used paperback book. It has minimal reader's creases on the spine and the paper is slightly yellowed. But it is in good shape, has its cover and is in totally readable condition.

I'll mail within 2 days of close of auction.

For forty-one years Margaret Hunter Bridges faithfully followed her mother's credo, "If something unpleasant is happening, pretend not to notice", but it becomes impossible not to notice when life is unraveling at every edge. Funny, poignant, and unforgettable, Looking for Atlanta is the story of a woman at the end of her past who faces her future with a determination unmatched in Atlanta since Scarlett O'Hara.

This superior first effort brings a fresh voice to a much-studied subject, a woman struggling to redefine herself in a changing society. Raised to be a true Southern lady and to believe in all the region's traditions, Margaret Hunter Bridges finds as she reaches middle age that the world she knew has disappeared. Atlanta's mansions are being razed in favor of gleaming planned communities, her husband has left her for a young woman, her son dyes his hair several different colors and her much-loved daughter died in a freak accident. The novel begins and ends on April 17, 1981, when Margaret sits with a journal on the roof of her best friend's house, joined by her yard man. From there, her memories carry the reader through different eras and events, including her childhood and marriage, in a non-chronological narrative whose occasionally confusing structure is the novel's only major weakness. The story's emotional impact is consistently strong, as Margaret's first-person account mingles self-denial, compassion, wit and pain to show a woman attempting to come to terms with a life that is much tougher than anyone told her it would be.