Owning Jolene

Shelby Hearon

Nov 2011 · Kuthengiswe ngu-Knopf

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From the time she was seven, Jolene Temple has been a pawn between her feuding parents, each of whom has become practiced in kidnapping her from the other. She has been left emotionally suspended between two philosophies of life: that of her stolid, conventional father, "always saving for a rainy day," and of her recklessly adventurous mother, "always saying she enjoyed a little shower." Having adopted a different disguise each time her mother stole her away, at 19 Jolene is still unsure of her real identity; she is at ease only in acting a role. When she meets bland L. W. Dawson, she thinks he holds the answers to her quest to be "normal." Meanwhile, however, she has been posing for, and has become the mistress of, middle-aged, twice-divorced artist Henry Wozencrantz, who has much to teach her about facing life without running away. Set in present-day Texas of oil-bust hard times ("the whole state is claiming Chapter Eleven"), the novel delivers wickedly funny, incisive social commentary as well as vivid, quirky characters as outsized as the Lone Star State.

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SHELBY HEARON was born in Marion, Kentucky, lived for many years in Texas and New York, and now makes her home in Burlington, Vermont. She was the author of sixteen novels, including Footprints, Life Estates, and Owning Jolene, which won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. She received an Ingram Merrill grant as well as fellowships for fiction from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she twice won the Texas Institute of Letters fiction award. She died in 2016.