Tangier Love Story: Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, and Me
By Carol Ardman
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About this ebook
Carol Ardman
Carol Ardman informed her parents in a letter at age five that she intended to become a writer. After graduating from the University of Michigan, she went to New York, supporting herself as a waitress in Greenwich Village, then writing for fan magazines and assisting the blind labor columnist Victor Riesel with research and ghostwriting his Saturday syndicated newspaper columns. Ardman has contributed to the New York Times, the NY Daily News, the Journal of Commerce, Ms. magazine, the Book of Knowledge, and other publications, and her fiction has appeared in Pequod and other literary journals. She is the coauthor with Loren Fishman, MD, of four self-help books for people with medical issues, and she has blogged for medical experts on the Huffington Post. She is currently at work on another memoir and a novel.
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Tangier Love Story - Carol Ardman
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Copyright © 2014 by Carol Ardman
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Table of Contents
Tangier Love Story
Reading Guide Questions
About the Author
1.
Jane Bowles was in the back of my mind when I bought a three-week excursion ticket to Tangier during the summer of 1970. I had read the Collected Works of this writer’s writer
and had fallen love with her stories and her characters, in whom I saw deep, previously unarticulated parts of myself. At 28, I was the lonely child she wrote about, desperately trying to control her life, in a story titled A Stick of Green Candy.
I was the woman waiting in vain for her husband, the naive American in an unfamiliar culture. Like Jane Bowles’ characters, who made me laugh and cry, I felt stuck in every way. I was living alone in a small Greenwich Village walk-up after a devastating divorce from a composer whose star was on the rise. I had had entry-level jobs in publishing, but now, freelancing as an editor of mediocre paperback romance novels only increased my isolation and sadness.
If I could ever become a writer—and I had always wanted to, though I didn’t know how, or even why—I would want to write like Jane Bowles. It was ridiculous, but I wanted to become Jane Bowles, whose photo I had studied on the dust jacket of her book, a lovely, sophisticated expatriate with a daring life. I felt I knew her, a young woman sitting outdoors against a background of foliage, her chin in her palm, pensively looking down. She was petite, as I was, and she wore a plaid blouse that could have hung in my closet. Her short dark curls spilled onto her forehead, like mine, but unlike me she wasn’t mired in inertia and failure. Gazing at her photo, I had a crazy thought: If by some strange quirk of fate I were to meet Jane Bowles, it might change everything. Maybe all my problems—especially my difficulty finishing anything I started to write—would disappear.
And yet, as I packed my bathing suits and sandals, my jeans, my journal and, on a whim, a piece of good blue stationery for my trip to Morocco, I wasn’t really thinking of the writer I idolized. Or of her husband, Paul Bowles, though a friend had given me a copy of his book The Sheltering Sky to read on my trip. I was looking forward to some rest and rejuvenation, a mood-lifting 21-day vacation, to getting a tan, sleeping in, maybe dancing with a handsome stranger, but most importantly turning a page on my stalled, sad existence.
2.
By the time I left for Morocco, both Jane and Paul Bowles were