Recipient of the Florida Humanities Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing, she is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University at Tallahassee.
Burroway applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Simone in Pieces, and shared the following:
The Page 69 Test works miraculously well for Simone in Pieces, showing Simone at a crucial turning point in her life, between a refugee childhood and a scholarship in New York City.Visit Janet Burroway's website.
Simone Lerrante was rescued, alone, from the Belgian coast during the Nazi occupation of WWII. She was ten years old. Now she is in her early twenties, having lived through three periods with British families, and been awarded a good degree at Cambridge and a Fulbright. Page 69 is a critical hinge “piece” of the self that, because she has lost her childhood memory, she must gradually construct.
Here she is at her most confident, with perhaps a touch of hubris?—having “shed her old self like a skin. She’s her American self; optimistic, even sassy.” She has charmed her way up from steerage to Cabin Class, “exactly as she intends to do” in New York, has been invited to lunch at the purser’s table with a couple from South Dakota and a gaggle of wealthy Americans, and now she has been offered a bath in the couple’s cabin.
With a “flute’s worth of champaign and half a snifter of Remy Martin” in her “lean and solid, long, presentable body,” she finds herself deliciously adrift, “wafting in the water sloshing in the tub on the ship that wallows in the ocean that is cradled by the underwater mountains of the planet Earth, which is a bubble adrift in the solar system.”
For the moment, adrift is a delicious state. Too delicious? Can that ambitious stasis morph to “nomad,” where to be adrift becomes a permanent state and an unfulfilled way of being?
The Page 69 Test: Bridge of Sand.
--Marshal Zeringue
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