Desperate Housewife: Marie Grace de Repentigny
If I'm a lousy writer then an awful lot of people have lousy taste.
-Grace Metalious
Earlier this morning I went to my local medical clinic to have a sebaceous cyst removed from the back of my shoulder. It’s actually not as bad as it sounds, but my shoulder hurts like a bitch right now, which is making it painful to type. Anyway, while sitting in the waiting room I decided to sift through the clinic’s magazines and read up on all the glam going on in Hollywood. I started reading the overrated Vanity Fair issue with Tom Ford and a couple of famous naked white women on the cover (who look like they could use a few sandwiches). Much to my delight I found an article on Grace Metalious, author of the scandalous and explicit 1956 novel Peyton Place. I was even more excited to discover that the life of the New Hampshire author is coming to the big screen. Sandra Bullock, who is also producing the flick, will play Metalious. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I’m really excited about seeing this movie. Hopefully, it’ll be done right:
"Peyton Place" came out in September 1956 from Julian Messner, a small publisher that was willing to take a chance on its scandalous contents because it also saw the possibility that those contents would cause it to take off. Which it did. Rather quickly, helped by an Associated Press interview with the author, word of it got out and it began to climb the New York Times best-seller list.
On Nov. 25, it reached No. 1, the first of two separate stays, totaling 29 weeks, at the top spot. It remained on the list for almost a year and a half. In the fall of 1957, a paperback edition came out…A daughter of French Canada who had always lived in the small, poor towns of New Hampshire, she apparently was less able to cope with the stresses of success than with those of poverty. Besides "Return to Peyton Place," she published two other books, "The Tight White Collar" (her own favorite) and "No Adam in Eden," before dying in February 1964 of chronic liver disease.
(via The Washington Times)
