Researching a great-grandmother, who vanished forever after arriving in Chicago from Pittsburgh in 1905, Abbott encountered Minna and Ada Everleigh, who ran the Everleigh Club on Chicago’s South Side. I know it’s a cliché, but she writes page-turners.”Ī native of Pennsylvania, Abbott was a freelance writer living in Atlanta with her husband when she started exploring her family’s history. “I adore her style and her affection for history and its characters is so in line with mine. She has been a fan and friend of Abbot’s since the beginning, which can be marked by the 2007 publication of Abbott’s first book, “Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul” (Random House). American Rose is an ambitious story told in an ambitious style and, much like modern art, it looks effortless because it is impeccably well done.“Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America” (Crown), by Karen Abbott. If you're not a biographile, the transitions might even slip by unnoticed, incrementally heightening the drama with each page until, at the book's crescendo, you find you're almost winded. We enter the narrative at three distinct points and flip between them throughout: Gypsy, post-1939 Gypsy, pre-1939 and the Minsky Brothers burlesque clubs in the 1920s.
And yet, Abbott exercises masterful control over her colorful cast of characters, all while guiding three separate narrative strands. The relationship between Gypsy, her controlling mother and the younger sister who stole her name offers enough material for a whole master's thesis on Freud, and that's just one of the many tangled relationship dynamics here worthy of analysis. The life of Gypsy Rose Lee- "this Dorothy Parker in a G-string", famous for her "burlesque of burlesque"- is perhaps best likened to a Greek drama. In the case of Karen Abbott's American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life & Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (Random House, 2012), the benefit is that the book reads like a slick, sexy film noir and it is virtually impossible to put down. This makes sense, as it's how we live our lives, but there are advantages that come with non-linear structure. As a whole, the genre of biography trends towards linear narratives-wherein the events of a subject's life are tracked in the order that they occurred.
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