From the Publisher
Billie Livingston's fine second novel leads us to consider the
nature of our hidden lives and desires - and to question whether
the sky would really fall if we admitted our true needs and ceased
to blush.
As Cease to Blush opens, Vivian is late to her own
mother's funeral. Wearing a tight red suit, Vivian stands out like
a pornographer's dream amongst the West Coast intellectuals
mourning the death of prominent feminist Josie Callwood. But for
all of her bravado, Vivian finds herself emotionally numb and
spiraling downward. Vivian and her mother were in constant
conflict, with Josie disapproving of her daughter's lifestyle; her
inclination to use her body instead of her brain, and her so-called
acting career, which has amounted to little more than playing
prostitutes and the odd dead body. For her part Vivian has been
invested in antagonizing her mother's feminist ideology. As the
story opens Vivian's career, as well as her relationship with
boyfriend Frank, is taking an unsavoury turn as she wades into the
quick cash scheme of Internet porn with herself cast in the
lead.
But Josie has left a big surprise for her troubled daughter: a
trunk full of mementoes from her own past, all of which point to a
secret life more exotic than anything Vivian has been able to pull
off. Puzzling together bits and pieces, Vivian learns that her
mother was at one time a burlesque performer named Celia Dare who
rubbed shoulders with the flashiest celebrities of the sixties.
Vivian becomes determined to uncover the true story of her mother's
life.
Chasing rumours, Vivian sets off down the Pacific coast and soon
finds out that truth is a slippery snake. With only a few of her
mother's letters, some guarded anecdotes from Josie's former
confidant and a slew of books about the sixties, Vivian begins to
re-create her mother's life, placing her at the heart of some of
the biggest events and scenes of the era. From the protests and
beat coffeehouses of Haight-Ashbury to the frenzied nightlife of
Rat Pack Vegas, from the political soirées of New York to mob
meetings in glitzy Miami hotels, Celia Dare saw and did it all. Yet
the glamour hid an ugly underbelly, and as Vivian peels away the
layers of the past she begins to uncover her own emotional truths
as well.
Cease to Blush drives the bumpy road from the
burlesque stages of Rat Pack Vegas to the bedroom Internet porn
business, exploring just how far women have really come. In Vivian,
Livingston has created the perfect character through which to
explore what it means to be an independent woman today; with
Celia/Josie, it's clear that things weren't so cut and dry in her
day either. Though Celia's story is told vividly here, its accuracy
is impossible to gauge and the ghosts are not talking. But maybe
this is Celia's gift to Vivian: the ability of the past not only to
illuminate the future, but to re-imagine it.
About the Author
Billie Livingston is a fiction writer, poet and sometime essayist
who lives in Vancouver, B.C. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, she grew up
in Toronto and Vancouver, and has since lived in Tokyo, Hamburg,
Munich and London, England. Her first employment was filling the
dairy coolers in a Mac's Milk. She went on to work varying lengths
of time as a file clerk, receptionist, cocktail waitress, model,
actor, chocolate sampler and booth host at a plumber's
convention.
Cease to Blush (2006) is
Billie Livingston's second novel. Her first, Going Down
Swinging (2000), is told from the viewpoints of an
alcoholic, downtrodden mother named Eilleen and her struggling
daughter Grace. It was received as a brilliant debut, with one
reviewer commenting: "Livingston succeeds gorgeously in capturing
the messiness and unresolvable ambiguities of familial love. Her
lovingly drawn, half-crazy characters always transcend a
caseworker's clichés." Livingston's first book of poetry,
The Chick at the Back of the Church (2001), was
shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award (for best book of poetry by a
Canadian woman), and her award-winning short fiction has been
published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. She is
currently working on a new novel.
In creating the character of Vivian for Cease to
Blush, Livingston drew on a few experiences from her
career as a model and actor. For instance, Vivian's gig as a corpse
was based on something that actually happened to Livingston: "They
called and asked if I wanted to do a photo shoot for a show called
Touching Evil, playing a dead body," Livingston commented
in one interview. "I was dead by the side of a river, and they put
strangle marks on my neck. Then they changed their mind. They said,
'No, wrong corpse.' Then they put all this white makeup on, wrapped
me in a shower curtain and photographed me strangled, on a bathroom
floor. So that was why I was there for so long. All the other
[dead] girls were sent home after three hours." But at the same
time, Livingston has to laugh when people assume the book is
autobiographical - "Yes, every word - in fact I think Bobby Kennedy
is my daddy!" - rather than recognizing that the best fiction
always draws tidbits from wherever it can, whether inspiration,
research or the author's own life.
In truth, the writing of Cease to Blush couldn't
have happened without Livingston's extensive research into not only
the events of the sixties but also everything from evangelical
churches to the porn industry. Fortunately, Livingston has a
passion for meeting new people who can take her into their worlds,
and has commented, "I really do love talking to strangers… Even
when they're really odd or sort of creepy, there's a little part of
you that kind of - what do I want to say? - it's almost like you
fall in love with them a little bit, because they're so
fascinating. They're so at odds with anything you've ever seen up
until that moment." Not surprisingly, much of Cease to
Blush was written on road trips as Livingston went in
search of Vivian's story through the western United States.
To recreate the headiness and tumult of the sixties and the Rat
Pack scene, Livingston also turned to the many books and films that
provide accounts of the time. Luckily, this research tied in with
one of the main themes of Cease to Blush, which is the
subjective nature of truth - and especially the difficulty we have
in figuring out the "truth" of the past. As Livingston put it in
one interview, "I read all those biographies so that I could
recreate all of those people, yet you read three biographies of the
same person and they're all different. It calls [the truth] into
question: if four people are in a room and an event happens, they
all have a different observation of how it all went down."
Hardcover
480 Pages, 6.36 x 9.29 x 1.42 in
November 1, 2007
English
0679313222
9780679313229