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    Knock Knock: A Life
    Knock Knock: A Life
    Knock Knock: A Life
    Ebook254 pages4 hours

    Knock Knock: A Life

    By Suzanne McNear

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This autobiographical novel establishes Suzanne McNear as a distinctive voice in American literature. Written with the same quirky, ironic sensibility that brought praise for her story collection, Drought, it carries the reader through the upheavals of the sixties and seventies - the impact of Betty Friedan, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the Vietnam War - in a style that is comic and painful and true.

    It traces March River's journey from before birth, through her early years in a small Midwestern city where she felt always slightly out of step, east to boarding school in Connecticut, and finally to Vassar, where she finally felt at home. Unfortunately, on graduation, and unlike most of her classmates, she has no engagement ring, nor promise of one. "Perhaps you're one of those people who will never marry," her mother , a woman known to rattle her pearls and hit a mean golf ball announces.

    After various jobs in New York and a love affair that ends abruptly she follows what seems the only practical path; pregnancy, marriage, children and life in Chicago. Seven years later, after many upheavals, there is a divorce and a terrifying breakdown. Her husband's chief occupation was writing mystery novels and opening bottles of Heaven Hill bourbon. Life was marked by the birth of three daughters and economic disaster.

    This is a portrait of a woman who is fragile, uncertain, sometimes overwhelmed by life, but also fiercely committed to the survival of herself and her daughters. With courage, black humor, and unusual literary friendships, which included Saul Bellow, she eventually becomes an editor at Playboy and finally finds a sense of peace and accomplishments.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Permanent Press
    Release dateDec 31, 2012
    ISBN9781579622862
    Knock Knock: A Life
    Author

    Suzanne McNear

    Susan McNear, a former editor and free lance journalist, now devotes herself to writing fiction, poetry and plays. Her essays have been published in The New York Times and Vogue. Like her protagonist, she was born in the Midwest, attended Vassar, had a horrific marriage, was an editor at Playboy, has three daughters, and a friendship with Saul Bellow. For the past fifteen years she's lived in Sag Harbor, New York.

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    Reviews for Knock Knock

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Although this is McNear's first novel, she is no amateur writer, having spent years in magazine publications as an editor and later a freelance journalist. It is not clear if this might be a fictional creation or an actual memoir by the author using a fictional name. Nevertheless, it is a well written book with nice visual images that are presented as run-on phrases at times and yet has structure to take the main character from birth and an early struggle to mature adulthood.This book was received from the publisher as an Early Reviewer in exchange for an honest review.
    • 5/5
      Wow, what a surprisingly delightful book! I received a copy from the publisher and, admittedly it did take me a while to really get into the story. The book is described as a "fictional memoir" but it didn't read like a memoir to me. It was actually quite stylized and reminded me of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." It sort of meandered from one moment to the next and the lack of quotation marks was at first difficult to adjust to but later helped the narrative to flow unencumbered. Once I got into the story I couldn't put it down. It's beautifully written; in fact it's quite lyrical. The story is that of March, who begins life as a rather unhappy soul and descends into a downward spiral of depression and hopelessness. Eventually she slowly begins to come out and find her way in the world. There did come a point where I worried that the story would go so deep into this woman's troubled mind, that I would somehow lose the empathy I had for her, or perhaps the belief I had that her struggles mirrored many other woman living in the same time period. But the author pulled her out, slowly and realistically, and in the end, while her life wasn't perfect, March indeed had a story that was worth sharing. I highly recommend this book and hope to convince several of my friends to read it, as the constant literary references and unique story should lead to many interesting discussions.
    • 2/5
      One of those books that no matter how many times I picked it up, I couldn't get into to. I only manged to get about half way before I gave up, for now at least. Not to say that it is a bad story, but something about it just didn't pique my interest. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to pick it up again and get sucked in.
    • 4/5
      Knock Knock by Suzanne McNear is fantastic. The narrative is a bit stream of consciousness, although it is a third person narrator, not first person. The book follows March Rivers through her life, from childhood to old age, concentrating a lot on her emotional responses to events. So much of what March feels is relatable.The writing style is unique and provocative. As lyrical as poetry. Again, part of the point of the book (in my opinion) was to focus on March's emotions, so this style works well. The immediacy is clear and strong.I know not everyone will enjoy this novel, but fans of literary fiction will.
    • 4/5
      Reading much like a memoir, this novel is presumably an autobiographical account of the author's journey both geographically and emotionally. A naive young woman from the Midwest, March lands in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago at different times in her adult search for belonging and purpose. From a slow start, this book gains momentum as March does. The flat affect is somewhat hypnotic, and there's a distance between the reader and the narrator that is somehow compelling.
    • 2/5
      I couldn't get into this book. The writing style came across very choppy and disjointed to me and made it impossible to care about any of the characters. I finished it only because I can't stand to not finish a book. Would not recommend.
    • 5/5
      I liked this book very much. KNOCK KNOCK is a very unusual sort of book. It is a "ficitional memoir," with an engaging heroine in March Rivers. You remember that song, "It's a Hard Knock Life," from ANNIE? Well, in many ways, March's life was that, and then again mabye not so much. What do I mean? Well, she came from a wealthy family in little LaRue, Wisconsin. But her parents were not the most loving kinda people, which may have caused some insecurities early on. Boarding school, Vassar, a youthful affair. Then she married Warren Wright,this California guy who was kind of a jerk - a drinker, a dreamer and a wanna-be-writer who didn't do much to support March and their three girls. But she always had the family fortune to fall back on, so even after Warren left, Daddy's money was there for her when she needed it. So after surviving a mental and emotional meltdown for a while, she finally managed to pull up her socks and go back to grad school, after which she got a good editorial position at PLAYBOY magazine and was able to support herself and her three daughters.And that's when the story really got interesting, at least for a booklover like me. She tells of her early aspirations as a writer and brings in real names of writers and literary types who befriended her along the way. People like Maggie Cousins, Playboy fiction editor Robie Macauley, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel and Saul Bellow. Cousins, a NYC editor saw promise in the first pages of March's novel and its "beaten bird" narrator, and encouraged her to finish it. But it would be nearly fifty years before the novel was finally finished, after March's daughters were grown and married and had kids of their own. And that's where the story really became interesting to this booklover, with all of its real-life literary figures and anecdotes - about Dickey, Malamud, Bellow, Updike, Cheever and others.KNOCK KNOCK is a book for booklovers. It reads like a who's who of literature from the 60s and 70s. The odd thing is it also reads like the work of a much younger woman. Its author may be deep into her seventies by now, but she still retains all the appetites, emotions and sensibilities of her younger years. It's not until the final pages, the Epilogue, that you feel the wisdom gained from those younger hard-knock years. Did I say I LIKED this book? Well, I do. Suzanne McNear can write like nobody's business. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      I was surprised by how much I actually liked this book. I mean, what's a "fictional memoir"? I was annoyed by the idea, it seemed gimmicky to me. Basically, a memoir, but told like a novel, using third person and a fictional name. I was prepared to hate it. But, Suzanne McNear is an engaging writer with a great story to tell. I just couldn't help but like her (the fictional "her" anyway), and I wanted to know how the story ended! An easy read, you'll especially like it if you like memoirs, stories of the heyday of Playboy, or just the days when you could write a book and actually get it published even if you didn't have a national platform on the Web already!
    • 3/5
      I really don't know if this was a story or a memoir but it was very worth reading. I enjoyed following the life of March Rivers. She was a delightful heroine and the story was told in such an engaging manor that I didn't want to reach the end. I think the places and eras were brought about with such powerful imagery that I felt I was remembering that long ago life too.
    • 1/5
      “KNOCK KNOCK a Life” is written in the cadence of a giddy school girl and lends little entertainment value and even less emotional insight. It is a laborious read that most will find not worth the time invested.

    Book preview

    Knock Knock - Suzanne McNear

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