In the 1950's, on the football field, the dance floor or the back seat of the family Buick, all was fair in love and war. As a freshman in high school, Fran wandered onto the playing field looking for love in all the wrong faces. Fair Game is the story of a girl's high school travails in the 1950's.
Fran's first book, Crocodile Tears and Lipstick Smears, is "...funny, coy and moving... a complex cast of family, friends and (enemies). If that's not enough, Gabino brings a secret weapon - a genuine gift for language. She writes with wit, verve and style," says Kyle Eller of Duluth Budgeteer News.
See what the Duluth Budgeteer News said about Fair Game.
A seamy look at the frisky '50s
Controversial 'Fair Game' is not just about sex
Kyle Eller
Budgeteer News
If you do not have Fran's first book, Crocodile Tears and Lipstick Smears, order it along with your order of Fair Game
A two-time cancer survivor, Fran Gabino has attended the prestigious University of Iowa Writers Workshop.
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Book
Reviews for:
Fair Game
A Young Girl's Odyssey Through the
Not-So-Fabulous Fifties |
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Rating: Excellent
Comments: just could not wait until I finished your book, Fair Game, to tell you that I absolutely love it! One of my friends also bought it today after I raved about it, THANK YOU for writing such a delicious book!
Submitted by: Rita Stalvig on 7/27/2004 8:01:34 AM |
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Rating: Excellent
Comments: "A frank and brave book,"
Submitted by: Gina Temple, Ripsaw News, on 7/27/2004 8:04:07 AM |
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Rating: Excellent
Comments: "Besides sex, the book gives you a real feel for the times. Cheap bars, the back seat of cars. Peddle-pushers. Picnics in Billings Park. Hamburger joints..."
Submitted by: Mike Nardine, Reader Weekly, Duluth MN on 7/27/2004 8:05:21 AM |
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Rating: Excellent
Comments: I found out things about my mothers teenage years that a son should not know. I wanted to ground her for a month after reading this book... glad Fran changed the names! I laughed through it mostly... was shocked more than once... what a great read!
Submitted by: Larry Verkeyn on 7/27/2004 8:38:14 AM |
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Rating: Excellent
Comments: Coming of Age in the 1950s
Fair Game is a memoir of Fran Gabino's four years at Central High School in Superior, Wisconsin. Born into a working class home without a father, she had periodic bouts of wanting to succeed: she made the honor roll one semester; was chosen for Central High's Radio Commission to make the day's announcements; almost had her art work displayed; and had dancing successes.
But the overriding theme of Gabino's memoir, the thread knitting it together, is her sexual encounters. And she kept a record of each one in a book hidden in her room.
Gabino had little knowledge but much curiosity about sex. Her girl friends talked of their own sexual experiences, but none had the vocabulary or
background to analyze them or to tell Gabino what she hungered to know. Her mother tried, but her own first sexual experience had turned out badly. She could only offer a warning, "The point is, Fran, you can't trust men. Once you do what they want, you're finished."
Her mother went on to dream aloud of Fran's potential as a ballerina, leaving Fran torn with guilt and fear. Her mother's dreams for her, given their poverty, were unattainable. Besides, Fran thinks, "There's so many adventures waiting."
Whether Gabino didn't understand, or chose to ignore it, her sexuality would be judged by a different standard than that of young men. She lived in a time when the terms "slut," "tramp," and "bitch" were casually bandied about by men, and reputations were smeared with the same indifference as they, men, spit on the sidewalk.
She wasn't safe even within her own family. Before family dinner on New Year's day at an aunt's house, a cousin warns Gabino to, "watch out for," the male cousin and uncle, both of whom spend the day doing their best to rub against, touch, and grab Gabino. Over dinner, the uncle becomes agitated and spouts, "Divorce is the ruination of society." The irony of his statement is obvious, and it is significant that no one laughs.
Gabino's title, Fair Game" is chillingly accuratesuggestive of the hunter, armed with male prerogatives, stalking the hunted, whose only protection was
obeisance to social mores formulated by the hunters. Anyone who chooses not to conform to the rules is fair game.
Only later would women's ambitions, sexuality, and lawful rights become part of the social landscape, a landscape never even glimpsed in the 1950s.
Had Gabino been born in 1945 instead of 1935, her life might have played out differently. Her adolescent rebellion would have happened smack in the social revolution of the sixties. During the, Summer of Love she could have stood beside a highway with her thumb out, hitching rides to the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival where she would have been part of a crowd of kids from across the country wildly applauding Gabino's doppelganger, a new star on the music scene, Janis Joplin. Or in 1969 she could have stood with
thousands like herself in front of the bandstand at Woodstock, New York, cheering along with Country Joe as he taunted the Vietnam generals and warned folks that their boys would come home in a box. And, in just about any city, she could have marched for women's right to an abortion, for gay rights, or for racial equality.
Had she been born ten years later, perhaps all of her talent, her energy, her inner beauty would have found an outlet sooner and flourished. Instead, Fran Gabino came of age in the 1950s.
Gloria Steinem wrote that Marilyn Monroe's vulnerability was too painful for her to watch. I felt that way reading Gambino's, Fair Game. Despite that, I
couldn't put it down.
I disagree with Gabino about survival, though. Survival is necessary, but not sufficient.
Submitted by: Marjorie Merithew on 9/3/2004 6:22:17 AM |
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Rating: Excellent
Comments: My great auntie is the best writer ever.
Submitted by: lacey marro on 2/2/2006 11:24:49 AM |
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