ArtemisSmith's ODD GIRL Revisited: an autobiographical correlate

A first-hand account of the formative years of the 1950-60's civil rights coalition movements by the author of the underground pulp fiction best sellers 'Odd Girl', 'The Third Sex' and 'This Bed We Made' recommended by many multinational scholars as indispensable additions to every Women's Studies, GLBT, LGBU-Unisex/Unirace and Art History archive. The ground-breaking LGBU activist novel in the Appendix has been cited since 1959 by nearly all the name reviewers of the genre and is a recognized classic in demand by modern researchers. Below are excerpts from the 2010 Review by Mel Keegan in GLBT BOOKSHELF.How often have you heard it said (and doubted it) , life is stranger than fiction?"ArtemisSmith's ODD GIRL Revisited:an autobiographical correlate" by Artemis Smith (ISBN 978-1-878998-38-5) is probably the proof of the old adage'-- for if this were not an autobiographical work, in which the details pertinent to the first segment'-- the backstory of Ms. Smith's childhood -- would be easily verifiable, you would have to rank it as one of the most extravagant social melodramas of the century just gone, full of crowned heads, two out of the three True Faith religions in head-on collision, the most exotic of locations, from Paris to Rome to the dark cities of Scandinavia, and the fortunes of individuals and noble households caught up in both war and the cultural upheaval out of which the twentieth century was forged.And all this, in the first 20 pages ... not counting the footnotes, of which there are ... a lot. (I do have a minor problem with footnotes in a work of this kind. The asides and remarks seem, to me, to belong in the text. They are like the marginal notes one makes for incorporation in the next, or last, draft. Footnotes are most definitely the author's fancy, however ... as if she has hit the pause button and turned to the reader to interject some juicy tidbit which was, for some reason, blue-penciled from the project. Who knows how the minds of editors work?) The work is very personal, and told with an almost desiccated humor which I'm sure I'm not imagining, and which I fear will skip right over the heads of most modern readers without even disturbing the hair'-- which is regrettable, since the humor helps humanize a work which deals with a multitude of characters and locations which, at the 'outset,' change with every breath, while the "plot twists" oscillate between the Parisienne café culture, the Roman art studio and post-war New York.'If this were a movie ... it would have to be a mini-series. Survive the first 20pp, and the book shifts gears, entering a more modern scenario,' leaving the European settings, and 'moving to' the United States. The humor I perceive 'is razor sharp;' the story of an individual rather than a wide, freewheeling cast of characters..ArtemisSmith's ODD GIRL Revisited is a work of' rare scholarship'-- not the "easy read" ... a window on a world which is gone.. ODD GIRL Revisited is as much an invaluable glimpse into its times as into the lives and hearts of gay/Gay girls who grew up in the decades before most of us were born. The strength of the book is in its "realness." And I know that's not a word; but it's what I want to say. The people, places and events in this book are real.. Later, the book includes a collection of letters which reinforce the realness of the times, the hardships; and we gain a painful, illuminating insight into the realities of living with mental illness, as the author describes caring for, and loving, a partner whose intellectual brilliance and mental instability apparently rode in tandem. This kind of pain transcends national boundaries, gender identities, time frames...--Mel Keegan, BookWorld.editme.com GLBT Bookshelf, December 6, 2010. .