WHEN MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR WAS PUBLISHED IN 1955, Time magazine referred to it as “an outmoded adolescent cliché.” Kirkus Review wrote: “It is the kind of book women—just past the age of illusion—will read with absorbed interest, occasional ironic recognition, and ultimate critical detachment. But—despite the ease with which the story can be criticized, it will be read.” And read it was. Marjorie Morningstar sold more copies than Gone with the Wind, and in 1958 it was made into a movie starring Natalie Wood as Marjorie.
But as a teenager, I chose the books I read not by reviews or jacket copy or book sales. No, I chose by heft. I loved nothing more than the weight of a heavy book in my arms as I moved through the school hallways. In study hall, my homework finished, I fell into a fat novel that seemed to never end. That I didn’t want to end. Halfway through a seven-hundred-page book, hundreds of pages still waited for me. Doctor Zhivago. Les Misérables. James Michener’s Hawaii. Anything by Harold Robbins. I read indiscriminately. Highbrow. Lowbrow. Without any guidance from the librarians in my small mill town in Rhode Island. Their job seemed to be just to stamp due dates in the back of the books, not to recommend them. It was with this lack of direction, this love of novels the weight of cement, that I came upon Marjorie Morningstar.
I first read Herman Wouk’s novel in 1972, when I was fifteen years old. And I have reread it almost every year since. As an adult, I saw the similarities between the Morgensterns and my own family. Marjorie’s father had come to the United States at the age of fifteen, “a fleck of foam on the great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe.” I lived with a dizzying array of Italian immigrant relatives. In the novel, Mr. Morgenstern owned the Arnold Importing Company, “a well-known dealer in feathers, straws, and other materials for ladies’ hats.” Like my own father, who commuted several hours every day to his job in Government Center in Boston so that we could rise above our blue-collar immigrant roots, Wouk writes of Mr. Morgenstern: “Every year since his marriage he had spent every dollar he earned on the comfort of his family and the improvement of their station in life.” And like Marjorie, who understood her father’s sacrifices—“her parents had done much to make up for their immigrant origin. She was grateful to them for this, and proud of them.”—I too took pride in how my parents, two high-school dropouts who’d married before they were old enough to vote, had bought our family a slice of the American Dream: two cars, family vacations, T-bone steaks on the grill, and Tanqueray and Johnnie Walker in the liquor cabinet.
But at fifteen, that first time I read the novel, I thought that Herman Wouk had somehow climbed into my brain and emerged with my story. I was Marjorie Morningstar. Slightly spoiled. Boy crazy. Curious about sex. Terrified of sex. Raised by prudish, old-school parents. Although we lived far from Manhattan and an apartment on Central Park West, my life seemed a mirror image of Marjorie’s. West Warwick, Rhode Island, my small hometown, was once famous for Fruit of the Loom manufacturing and a bustling main street with two fancy women’s clothing stores and a men’s shop that sold expensive suits. But by the time I was a teenager, the shops and mills were mostly boarded up and the Pawtuxet River, which had helped those factories run, was polluted. The one factory that still operated made soap, and that was the smell that filled the air on hot afternoons. At Christmas, they opened their doors and sold Jade East soap on a rope at discount prices.
My immigrant great-grandparents left Italy in the late 1800s to work in the great Natick Mill, buying a house right up the hill from it. The Natick Mill burned down in 1941, the summer before my mother turned ten. But her family stayed put, working in factories around the state. I grew up in the house my great-grandparents bought when they arrived in the United States, where my grandmother married and had ten children, where my mother at the age of eighty-five still lives. The house is small, just three bedrooms with sloping ceilings upstairs and one bathroom downstairs.
As I’ve said, as a teenager I would sit at the top of the stairs, staring out the tiny window there. I could see the rooftops of three of my aunts’ houses. I could see a distant water tank. On a clear day I could see all the way to the next town. Someday, I would think, I’ll even go beyond there. Just thinking this would thrill me. Deep inside, I had a gnawing, a yearning, for something I could not name. All I knew was that I wouldn’t find it in West Warwick, or even in Rhode Island. It was beyond there. Despite my parents’ warnings, I threw myself into the path of everything that might take me beyond there. At fourteen, I became a Marsha Jordan Girl, one of eight teen models for Jordan Marsh, the fancy Boston department store that had opened a branch at our new mall. That job took me all over New England. My friend Beth and I went by bus and train alone to modeling jobs, landing spots in fashion shows for Brides magazine and Mademoiselle. With the money I earned, I took vacations to Bermuda and the Bahamas before I finished high school.
But that wasn’t enough for me. As a junior I tried out for and won the coveted role as teen editor from Rhode Island for Seventeen magazine. I wrote dispatches from Rhode Island on fashion, pop culture, and trends. At the end of my yearlong tenure, I won a Best Teen Editor Award, which gave me another year at Seventeen and a heavy silver charm with their logo on it. All of these things were somehow going to get me wherever it was I was trying to go. And this yearning I felt was the same one that Herman Wouk expressed so perfectly in the character of Marjorie Morningstar.