The Kind of Girl I Am

I'm rating this 5 starts because there aren't 6 to give. Julia Watts has an incredible talent for building full, large as live characters, and Vestal Jenkins is not an exception. The title of the book already suggests what you're going to find within, an unapologetic memoir of a woman who couldn't care less what others think of her, and who lives her live to pursue her goal with an intelligence and a determination that seem limitless. Vestal's character is carefully developed since the day she was born until the end of her days, and the fullness and weight of the character never lose an ounce of credibility, Vestal is consistent in her thoughts and deeds, and the book is so very consistent in the consequences of such thoughts and deeds. Towards the end of the book Watts puts into Vestal's mouth a thought along these lines: "There are two types of people in the world, those who do what they think they must, and are miserable all the time trying, and those who do what they want to do or die trying." This is a book that services this though from beginning to end to the last of its consequences. All of that, with Watts' delightful sense of humor that can make you smile or laugh out loud even in the most tragic moments, and that leaves you kind of wanting to jump into the pages of the book to make Vestal Jenkins's acquaintance.

Watts tells the moving first person story of a small city madam and her life from the coal camps to a nursing home with skill and passion. This novel has a wider scope than her past books and features her best writing. I can't imagine finding anyone who would not find this book both gripping and moving. Props to Watts, BTW, for featuring a thinly disguised Cas Walker as a character. Walker was the Knoxville, Tennessee grocer and politician who gave Dolly Parton her start in show business.

Julia Watts is a natural born storyteller, and in The Kind of Girl I Am, she has quite a story to tell. Spanning over fifty years, Watts's psychologically acute tale of Vestal Jenkins's journey from coal camp child to infamous Knoxville madam is ribald and bawdy but also smart: Vestal has much to teach all women about most men, and a lot to say about the lives of women in general. The Kind of Girl I Am is clearly Watts's breakthrough book, and she deserves a wide audience for it as well as a major publisher for her next novel; it would also make one helluva good movie!

When I first started reading the book, I thought it might just be another rags to riches story about a poor girl from nowhere. As I got deeper into the novel, I began to really like the main character, a young girl who ends up becoming a prostitute because she believes her job at a department store is not good enough for her. I ended up liking her so much and hoping that she would find a way to happiness without having to sell her body. I'm from the south, and one of the things I really like about the book is how it captures the way southerners express themselves through humor. I highly recommend this book.

When I was a kid, I overheard snatches of adult conversations as I popped in and out of the family living room. Accumulating a store of fragmented images based on the perceptions and judgments of one's elders is potentially dangerous or advantageous, depending on your point of view. I was a tyke during the sexual revolution of the 1960's, and even the culture of the conservative south seemed to be drenched in sex, courtesy of the television, the silver screen, and Playboy. I remember hearing a gaggle of neighborhood women at the public pool giggling about Shirley MacLaine as Irma La Douce, the prostitute with the heart of gold. Apparently, Irma had somewhat redeemed herself in their eyes by virtue of being saved by Jack Lemmon's character. But it seemed preposterous to me how a woman could make enough money to have a gold heart by spending 20 minutes alone with a man, and would a gold heart pump blood? As an eight-year-old, I took things literally. Well, I had no idea what a lady of the evening actually did to make her living, but I assumed it had something to do with wearing too much make-up and shopping at Watson's bargain basement instead of Nettie Lee's fine fashions. But as long as the hooker had the heart of gold, she apparently was not so bad. In her new novel, The Kind of Girl I Am, Julia Watts tells the story of Vestal Jenkins, a girl from a coal mining camp in southeastern Kentucky who uses her breathtaking beauty to escape the backwoods town that will surely deny her all that is good in life. From her poverty-stricken adolescence in Bartlett, KY to her career as a madam in Knoxville, TN, Vestal is in no way the stereotypical streetwalker. She begins life as an innocent, fairly happy child, the apple of her father's eye and more or less rejected by her mother, but when she enters the adult world, her naivety and purity are for the most part left behind. Vestal is betrayed and abandoned by just about everyone in her life, except for her brother's best friend, and therefore her first need is to survive. Vestal tells her own story and the tone is true to her character; she is a no nonsense business woman. We see her life from beginning to end, and Watts does a fine job of pacing the novel, filling out with vivid detail scenes that highlight the important moments in Vestal's adventurous life. Even though the driving force in Vestal's life seems to be the acquisition of wealth, we understand that coming from a world in which new shoes for a growing girl only come at Christmas, scrip is used to buy cornmeal for the evening meal of cornbread, and ignorance, birthing babies and back-breaking physical labor are a girl's future, an intelligent, unique person such as Vestal would do anything to change the course of her life. Watts is at her best in The Kind of Girl I Am. She writes about familiar territory, Appalachia, and deftly captures the flavor of the region where vowels are held a few beats longer, people "set" on their porches, and sc