Vertigo - Softcover

DeSalvo, Louise

3.93

164 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452273242 ISBN 13: 9780452273245

Publisher: Plume, 1997

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In 1958, 16-year-old Louise DeSalvo saw Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo 11 times in one week, transfixed by the lead character's fainting spells (from which she, too, suffered) and by the image of a woman-as-imposter falling to her death. In her own Vertigo, DeSalvo vividly recounts her attempt to transcend the limits of her own working-class girlhood--as well as depression and family violence--to forge an identity based on her own desires.

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About the Author:

Louise DeSalvo is the author of Conceived with Malice: Literature as Revenge, Breathless, and the internationally acclaimed study Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, among other books. A professor of English at Hunter College in New York City, she lives in Teaneck, New Jersey.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A biographer and literary critic's memoir of growing up in Hoboken, N.J., in a claustrophobic Italian-American family. DeSalvo (English/Hunter College; Conceived with Malice, 1994, etc.) was the first member of her working-class family to graduate from college. She escaped a stultifying home life--depressed and agoraphobic mother, belligerent and rigid father--through books, movies, study, and boys, boys, boys. She became a Virginia Woolf scholar, writing in her controversial 1989 study about the impact of childhood sexual abuse on Woolf's work. The effort to come to grips with the lingering mental strain caused by her mother's death, her sister's suicide, her memory of childhood traumas of her own--plus the intense, consuming life of an academic writer- -eventually compelled her to write about her own life in an effort to ``to give it some shape, some order.'' The result is an extremely readable book--if not necessarily a lovable one. DeSalvo's prose is plain; her tone often cool. We gain insight into her life and her mother's life--but not her dead sister's. New Jersey of the 1950s is vividly evoked, but DeSalvo's present situation as teacher, wife, and mother is less vivid. Among the book's best elements: a list of her mother's punitive and pathetic attempts at cooking--from liver, heart, and snails to head cheese, eels, and octupus. Vertigo's main failing is a lack of continuity; there is a grab-bag feeling to some of the reminiscences, and sometimes topics are misleadingly highlighted--a chapter called ``Anorexia,'' for example, is not about the anorexia of the author or anyone close to her, but rather about anorexia in general, and the effect is that of DeSalvo's trying to touch all possible feminist bases. Strangely cool, ultimately more successful as cultural history than psychological memoir, DeSalvo's book is nevertheless gripping in its parade of detail and profusion of stories about how ``a working-class Italian girl became a critic and writer.'' (Author tour) -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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