Seriously, people. And there are pages and pages of this.
Read three sentences from a novel by JCO and tell me how this airhead word soup could possibly come out of the same person.
By the way, last month JCO published the whitest American novel in 15 years and in that novel she used the word redneck several times without asterisks.
“JCO and tell me how this airhead word soup”
It had never occurred to me to look at her twitter feed before but I have now…. and I’m very sure it’s her (maybe slightly edited). And I immediately followed her because it’s amazing.
Her persona on the twitter feed is best described as ‘dotty aunt’ taking absurd but heartwarming pleasure in everyday things while remaining ignorant of others, forgetting what year it is or the reason for the gathering and bringing a pumpkin pie for a birthday party in September because she thought it was Thanksgiving. Where I grew up you could find her volunteering in the library mis-shelving books or local historical society. Florence King described the type in the South as a Dear Old Thing.
She does come across as extremely…. sheltered with a narrow social circle. Maybe she spends so much time on her professional writing that she simply hasn’t learned a lot of things that other people take for granted.
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The feed is so over-the-top that one does get a suspicion it might be some postmodernist taking a piss to drive conservatives with more modest intellectual resources rabid. They do react in outsized ways to every post. It might be a ploy to see how high they’ll jump.
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Clarissa
Sadly, you may have to consider dementia; there are many recognised named types of the illness, but memory loss with mood and personality changes are common. There is little point in worrying about some of the behavior in her twitters, enjoy some of the solid human insights she provided within her novels.
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“might be some postmodernist taking a piss”
I think you’re overthinking it. It’s more likely just plain old cognitive dissonance. She knows what she’s expected to say in university literati circles and she says it and she observes (some of) real life and never quite connects the two. Many such cases as Trump says.
I found her enthusiasm at a county (or state?) fair admiring the animals or young people dancing to be very authentic and endearing. The disconnect between her and some other issues also seems authentic.
Also, your upbringing might be clouding things. Central-Eastern Europe doesn’t have many dotty aunt types… the socio-economic environment is entirely too tough for such hothouse flowers. Crazy aunts are a thing (at least in Poland I know several people who have them) but they have a tough, authoritarian streak missing in the NAmerican models and if anything they are more intimidating than the standard little old lady (babcia in Polish… and they can be pretty intimidating if you get on their wrong side which I’m careful to avoid doing).
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I’m so glad you liked it!! It’s an outstanding novel. I’m very glad I opened it because I would have never read anything by this author otherwise.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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