Hollis Gillespie is an international flight attendant and a translator who speaks three languages. She's also a columnist for Creative Loafing, Atlanta's alternative newsweekly, and a frequent NPR commentator.
In Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch, Gillespie recounts and celebrates a childhood that others might soon forget - her mother's oddly kleptomaniacal tendencies, the time that the dog alone was vigilant enough to keep her sister from drowning in the pool, and her parents' train wreck of a marriage, which ended in divorce and soon after, the alcoholic death of her father.
Gillespie's perceptions of "normal" were skewed from her earliest memories. As a child, she was convinced that everyone's mother made bombs for a living:
"I thought everybody's mother left in the morning before the rest of the house was awake, then came home at night with a government badge clipped to their lapel with 'Top Security Clearance' printed above their picture. I thought everybody's mother walked through the door when the day was done, collapsed on a Herculon-upholstered recliner, and smoked Salem menthols with her wig askew while her kids melted down an entire stick of butter to pour over the popcorn they made themselves for dinner."
In Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch, Gillespie recounts and celebrates a childhood that others might soon forget - her mother's oddly kleptomaniacal tendencies, the time that the dog alone was vigilant enough to keep her sister from drowning in the pool, and her parents' train wreck of a marriage, which ended in divorce and soon after, the alcoholic death of her father.
Gillespie's perceptions of "normal" were skewed from her earliest memories. As a child, she was convinced that everyone's mother made bombs for a living:
"I thought everybody's mother left in the morning before the rest of the house was awake, then came home at night with a government badge clipped to their lapel with 'Top Security Clearance' printed above their picture. I thought everybody's mother walked through the door when the day was done, collapsed on a Herculon-upholstered recliner, and smoked Salem menthols with her wig askew while her kids melted down an entire stick of butter to pour over the popcorn they made themselves for dinner."
Her mother didn't really want to make bombs. And she didn't make nuclear bombs, a fact she clarified pointedly for her children. She wanted to be a beautician, which is why she studied cosmetology at night. Unfortunately, she was just much better at making bombs than at making beauty:
"She was woefully bad at cosmetology - when she used to practice on my sisters and me, we would always end up looking like open-casket cadavers in a group funeral."
However, it fell to Hollis Gillespie's mother to support Hollis, her brother, and her two sisters, as Gillespie's father failed miserably in this arena. An alcoholic travel-trailer salesman, Mr. Gillespie kept his head in the clouds and his feet drunkenly propped up on the La-z-boy recliner. His abilities as a father rated right down there with his success selling trailers.
"She was woefully bad at cosmetology - when she used to practice on my sisters and me, we would always end up looking like open-casket cadavers in a group funeral."
However, it fell to Hollis Gillespie's mother to support Hollis, her brother, and her two sisters, as Gillespie's father failed miserably in this arena. An alcoholic travel-trailer salesman, Mr. Gillespie kept his head in the clouds and his feet drunkenly propped up on the La-z-boy recliner. His abilities as a father rated right down there with his success selling trailers.
"Take our traditional Fourth of July family barbecue, for instance, where my father used everything from paint thinner to hair spray to fuel a grill fire so huge it could cause traffic copters to fall smoldering from the sky. There's still a patch on my brother's scalp where the hair won't grow back thanks to my father's infamous homemade 'honey glaze' sauce that contained melted pure-cane sugar. It might as well have been a big bowl of magma. It melted my father's favorite rubber spatula, but not before a drop flicked onto my brother's head. Screaming and clawing at his skull, my brother zigzagged all over the backyard before my mother was able to tackle him and pour beer on his head to keep my father's lava from boring into his brain."
Like a female David Sedaris, Gillespie mines humor from the dysfunction she knew growing up and that which she shares in adulthood with her blissfully-lost misfit friends. Her stories are brief vignettes, mostly culled from her Creative Loafing column. Humorous, thoughtful, and sometimes sad, they are bite-sized morsels that one consumes addictively. Just when you think you might put down the book, you'll find the next story entitled "A Pool of Piss," and won't be able to resist just one more. But one is never enough when the following stories include "Born-Again Booze Weenie," "An Ode to Crappy Cars," and "Confessions of a Festival Whore."
Before you know it, you've stayed up well past your bedtime ingesting Hollis Gillespie's personal tales like M&M candies. And the stories, no matter how uncanny, somehow always seem strike a note of universal truth and leave you nodding your head in appreciation and sympathy.
Thoughtful like Dave Barry but edgy like Sedaris, Hollis Gillespie is one Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch who won't be able to hide herself in Atlanta any longer.
Before you know it, you've stayed up well past your bedtime ingesting Hollis Gillespie's personal tales like M&M candies. And the stories, no matter how uncanny, somehow always seem strike a note of universal truth and leave you nodding your head in appreciation and sympathy.
Thoughtful like Dave Barry but edgy like Sedaris, Hollis Gillespie is one Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch who won't be able to hide herself in Atlanta any longer.
