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There’s a sense of slight relief when we see the sadism of some of the sexual encounters, for pleasure or for procreation, or what it’s like starting a “career” at a warehouse: I’m not quite there, I’m not that bad.Īnd yet, George is able to slyly probe the reader’s own sense of what being “there” means through her unfiltered prose.

#The babysitter book manual

George shifts their circumstances so that, as if enhanced by an Instagram filter, none of them is quite like we have actually seen or experienced: there’s of course no manual to life (though we sometimes want one) the baby being babysat will never age, placing its sitter’s temporary youth and attractiveness in sharp relief and the medical wards depicted are hubs of futuristic torture.

#The babysitter book how to

They are familiar, selves we may have been once in the past or could see ourselves being in the future: a grown woman who literally needs a manual to figure out how to be a functioning adult a too-old babysitter whose affair with her employer renders her more of the charge than the baby she’s ostensibly watching another woman trying to have a baby one dying in a hospital and one barely making ends meet in a pathetic day job. What sets The Babysitter at Rest apart from these is its more nuanced and subtle distortion through which the women are portrayed. In recent years, contemporary fiction has seen a tremendous rise of the so-called “girl book”-novels that not only have the diminutive word in their titles, but that question the very meaning of modern femininity in this way largely through disturbed and troubled main characters, characters who fall on a spectrum of psychotic from murderous ( Gone Girl, Girl on the Train) to cultish ( The Girls). Is there a way to transcend the mold I’ve been put into, first as a girl, and now maybe as an almost-woman?

Am I a cliché of my own ambitions and naiveté? it asks of its reader. As even the title and jacket art provocatively suggest, this multifaceted portrait of the young woman today is a still life of sorts, asking whoever picks it up to examine characters ostensibly failing at life and see those failures reflected back at her. The fact that the reader is laughing as much at the characters as she is at herself adds a layer of keen self-awareness to the book that, like Shelia Heti’s novel-from-life How Should a Person Be?, puts it in the camp of recent fiction that connivingly blurs the line between imagination and truth. George’s voice deftly shifts between her women’s points of view and different narrative modes, all of which ooze deadpan sarcasm and wit such that you can’t help but laugh. Decay sets in with the loss of possibility, not having children, having children, a string of failures over years, memories, jobs, aging, becoming out-of-shape, losing your looks, realizing you’re a one-trick pony or fraud or nothing special, and understanding things too late.”Īt least Jesus knew He was going on to greater things.ĭespite this disarmingly fatalistic setup of the real-life condition of the entire generation of young women living today presented at its outset, The Babysitter at Rest does ultimately redeem itself with its unconventional style and inventiveness. But this young woman is far from having anything you might call an “identity” rather, a Guide has been hired to train her to become an adult, proclaiming, “We find you at the point of early decay. The age Jesus Christ was when He was crucified the age when, according to some, one comes fully into adulthood and gains a sense of one’s identity. (Mar.We meet the first narrator, one of several loosely interchangeable female voices, of Jen George’s deliciously subversive collection of linked stories when she’s thirty-three years old. This tragic tale of a dysfunctional family and a psychopath is a page-turner. The authors smoothly blend Rodman’s affecting account of her childhood with thorough research into Costa’s crimes.

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Only in 2005, when Rodman confronted her mother about what happened to Costa, did she learn to her shock that he was a drug-addled pervert and serial killer who dismembered his female victims and buried them in the woods. In 1969, the police arrested Costa he was convicted of two murders and sentenced to life in prison, where he killed himself in 1974.

One of them was handyman Tony, whom Rodman remembers as a kind man who would take Rodman and her sister along with him on errands he was doing around the Cape. A promiscuous alcoholic, the mother would fob her two children off on any willing adult so she could bar hop. As children in the late 1960s, Rodman and her little sister spent summers in Provincetown, Mass., where her mother worked at a motel. Rodman debuts with an engrossing memoir that focuses on her relationship with serial killer Tony Costa (aka the Cape Cod Cannibal).