{"id":54486,"date":"2013-06-14T11:54:14","date_gmt":"2013-06-14T15:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=54486"},"modified":"2013-06-14T14:07:51","modified_gmt":"2013-06-14T18:07:51","slug":"fan-fic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/06\/14\/fan-fic\/","title":{"rendered":"Fan Fic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Eloiselarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When I was a junior in college, I treated my creative writing seminar to a story that was, even by my standards, bizarre. (I don\u2019t mean experimental, or particularly interesting, by the way\u2014just peculiar.) It was a piece of\u2014well, I guess you’d call it fan fiction, or maybe real person fiction, about the later life of Kay Thompson, the performer and author of Eloise<\/em>. If memory serves, this opus was set in Portofino, and involved Thompson descending into madness. (There was also a gay companion.) It was completely fabricated and also terrible. That story is, not tragically, lost to the mists of time. But I was excited to see that I am not the only one indulging in speculative Eloise fiction! In a piece on “Five Spinoff Novels I\u2019d Love to Read<\/a>,\u201d Edan Lepucki writes:<\/p>\n

\n

When I was younger, I didn\u2019t wonder much about the parents of Eloise, the six-year-old heroine who lives with her British nanny in the Plaza Hotel, putting sunglasses on her dog Weenie and combing her hair with a fork.\u00a0Now when I read the book to my son, I think about them a lot.\u00a0It\u2019s wealth that allows Eloise\u2019s mother to neglect her daughter, and it\u2019s the mother\u2019s absence that haunts the book.\u00a0What do we know of the woman? Eloise tells us that she is 30 and has \u201ca charge account at Bergdorf\u2019s.\u201d Her mother knows Coco Chanel, and has AT&T stock and \u201cknows an ad man whatever that is.\u201d\u00a0Sometimes she goes to Virginia with her lawyer.\u00a0Eloise\u2019s father is never mentioned. (Is the lawyer Eloise\u2019s dad, and Eloise just doesn\u2019t know it?)\u00a0I\u2019d love to read a novel narrated by Eloise\u2019s mother.\u00a0She\u2019s a rich fuck-up, to be sure, maybe a functioning alcoholic with a penchant for Bloody Marys at breakfast and champagne every afternoon. She loves her daughter, but can\u2019t stand to be around her for more than a few minutes.\u00a0She jets off to Milan, to Paris, forgetting to remember her offspring back in Manhattan. There would definitely be a strange and\/or degrading sex scene involving the owner of The Plaza.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We may be a match made in heaven!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a junior in college, I treated my creative writing seminar to a story that was, even by my standards, bizarre. (I don\u2019t mean experimental, or particularly interesting, by the way\u2014just peculiar.) It was a piece of\u2014well, I guess you’d call it fan fiction, or maybe real person fiction, about the later life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[11125,11124,11123],"class_list":["post-54486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-edan-lepucki","tag-eloise","tag-kay-thompson"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFan Fic by Sadie Stein<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 14, 2013 \u2013 When I was a junior in college, I treated my creative writing seminar to a story that was, even by my standards, bizarre. 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