So Much Pretty: If Things Are This Bad, Why Wouldn't You Tell Me?

"If things are really this bad, why wouldn't you tell me?" That's the line, from a child to her parent, that I found most haunting in an avalanche of them in Cara Hoffman's novel, So Much Pretty.

It's spoken by a girl in an era where young women are not as safe as we, as a civilized society, would like to think. The national news on any given week can bear that out, with images of the missing. Faces of the lost.

The cultural references in So Much Pretty come at a sometimes dizzying clip, activists rocking out to MC5 in a post rural company farm landscape. So while "Kick Out the Jams, Motherfuckers" plays in the background, activists struggling for a sustainable future begin to lose their hold on a future generation.

The book is dark, and A Harrowing Journey Through, or Dark True Life Tale are hard to embrace at the end of any day that brings images of girls not yet found. So Much Pretty takes that as a starting point and follows the journey so intimately, it leaves you with skin in the game.

Describing the process, Hoffman wrote her readers:

"In the year and a half it took me to write So Much Pretty I was paying attention to violence in women's lives and the demoralization of men's characters that rang like a continuous ambient hum in the air. Josef Fritzl, Jaycee Dugard, The Craigslist Killer, the woman found dead in the trailer ten miles from my apartment, the high profile cases and the small local cases, the women and girls worldwide raped, molested or killed by strangers, and always -- the three women a day, every day, all year long who are killed in the United States by their boyfriends or husbands.

The hum of these events, their cultural cache, the titillation and entertainment value that causes news outlets to run bikini pictures of a woman who was set on fire by her boyfriend, caused me to sit and think for a very long time about what, exactly, we are looking at, when we are looking at men and women. What are the things we all know and prepare for and warn our children about that we do not allow ourselves to act upon, or speak about in our day to day lives?"

The way investigative reporter Hoffman navigates the line between what is spoken and unspoken, and portrays a community's desire to address any crisis but the one next door make So Much Pretty a staggering read. It's all the more haunting based on the fact that Hoffman's debut novel was inspired by a real life case.

Hoffman will be speaking on July 14 at 6 p.m. in the St. Charles Baptist Church, 7100 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, with half of the proceeds of the book bought at Maple Street Book Shops in store and online through the date of the reading benefitting the Advocacy Center.

The book will also be available at the Bastille Day Maple Street Book Shop pre-opening today (July 9) from noon to 5 p.m. at 3141 Ponce De Leon Street, New Orleans.

 

Follow Karen Dalton-Beninato on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kbeninato