Saturday, June 22, 2019

"All The Greys on Greene Street"

Laura Tucker is a writer and former literary agent who has coauthored books on a wide range of topics, including health, fitness, parenting, and self-help. Her credits include Still Room for Hope by Alisa Kaplan, Standing Tall by C. Vivian Stringer, Shalom in the Home by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and Training for Life by Debbie Rocker. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tucker applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, All the Greys on Greene Street, and reported the following:
On page 69 of All The Greys on Greene Street, Olympia, the main character of the book, has left Washington Square Park with her friend Alex to find a payphone. (The book, I should mention, is set in 1981.) On the surface, the scene is a casual conversation between friends who have known each other since preschool, but it’s quickly apparent that there’s quite a bit of tension between them.

One source of that tension is longstanding: Alex is the kind of kinetic kid who never stops moving, and Ollie often finds this extremely annoying. But her irritation with him in this scene is definitely amplified by the uncomfortable questions Alex insists on asking about her dad’s sudden disappearance. The official story doesn’t add up, and Ollie knows it, but she’s not ready to ask why.

Page 69 also contains one of my favorite of Ollie’s memories:
[Alex’s] dad travelled so much for work, we thought LaGuardia was some kind of magical city until we were most of the way through third grade. “My dad’s flying out of LaGuardia tonight,” Alex would tell us, reverent and hushed, so that we could practically see the jacketed doorman hailing a cab while his dad waited under a heated marquee, beautiful globe lights reflecting off rain-slicked roads.

Then someone figured out that LaGuardia was just an airport in Queens.
Maybe I was overly prone to glamorous fantasies, but I remember many similarly disappointing moments of discovery. This might be one of the less lovely parts of growing up....
Visit Laura Tucker's website.

Writers Read: Laura Tucker.

--Marshal Zeringue