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    Beauty Before Comfort: A Memoir (Text Only)
    Unavailable
    Beauty Before Comfort: A Memoir (Text Only)
    Unavailable
    Beauty Before Comfort: A Memoir (Text Only)
    Ebook198 pages2 hours

    Beauty Before Comfort: A Memoir (Text Only)

    By Allison Glock

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    About this ebook

    A beautiful and touching memoir of Allison Glock’s grandmother, this is both an extraordinary portrait of a truly remarkable woman and a engaging history of 20th century Appalachia.

    '"Beauty before comfort," she would say as she trimmed her brows and cinched her belts corset-tight. My grandmother is so beautiful she has never once been comfortable, a cross she bears with the subtlety of Liberace.'

    So writes Allison Glock at the start of her remarkable memoir, the story of her maternal grandmother, Aneita Jean Blair, and the extraordinary life she led growing up in Chester, West Virginia, a sooty factory town wedged between the unforgiving Appalachians and the Ohio River. As a girl, a young woman, and even late in life as a grandmother, Aneita Jean had a magnetism that attracted and enchanted all she came into contact with. Allison Glock takes us through the stages of her life, capturing not only the irrepressible vitality of a woman born ahead of her time, but also the eccentricities of a small-town, working-class West Virginia family, trying to survive the Great Depression and the Second World War.

    Aneita, blessed with 'the body of Miss America' was determined that she would escape the town that was holding her back. That she never made it, and the pattern that her life ended up taking, is just another small-town tragedy of the vanished dreams of one extraordinary person. Allison Glock writes with humour, lyricism and beauty to create a truly unforgettable portrait of a remarkable person.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateAug 29, 2013
    ISBN9780007455461
    Unavailable
    Beauty Before Comfort: A Memoir (Text Only)

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    • 4/5
      I would not have picked up this memoir, but it was part of a research project I did. The first half is really excellent--the portrait of Glock's grandmother is memorable -- she's an Applachian femme fatale. The second half falters a bit as her grandmother fades out of the picture. It was still a good read, though.