A grandma who was a whole lot of woman

“I must have been around ten years old when I realized that my grandmother was not like other grandmothers,” recalls West Virginia-born writer Allison Glock. Even years later, when the adult Glock would go to visit her octogenarian progenitor (by that point confined to a nursing home), Grandma was still, in her own mind at least, a vamp:

“To Grandmother, a woman who didn’t bother to make the most of what God gave her was displaying a lack of fortitude. As far as she could tell, the only women who didn’t make themselves up were lesbians and lunatics, and while she had nothing against either group, she certainly strove to differentiate herself.

“ ‘Beauty before comfort,’ she would say as she trimmed her brows and cinched her waist corset-tight. My grandmother is so beautiful that she has never once been comfortable, a cross she bears with the subtlety of Liberace. Even now, at the age of eighty-one, she has her hair colored weekly and doesn’t descend the stairs without full makeup. If an opera spontaneously broke out at her nursing home, Grandmother would be appropriately dressed.”

For Glock’s grandmother, Aneita Jean Blair, born and raised in a small factory town in West Virginia, sex appeal was a tool that she hoped would transport her to a wider, richer, more glamorous and exciting world, like the one she had seen in the movies.

Aneita Jean was born in 1920, the second of five children. Her parents were a sadly mismatched couple, the mother a friendly, attractive, overweight woman who suffered from increasingly poor health, the father a grim, thin, driven man who worked in the local ceramics industry.

With her soft red hair, luminous pale skin and curvaceous figure, the adolescent Aneita Jean soon became aware of her power to attract the opposite sex:

“Boys began calling. So many boys. To amuse herself in high school, Aneita Jean decided she would woo as many men as possible. She devoted herself to soliciting their attentions and began to crave those spidery torments she didn’t yet have a name for. Attracting men made her feel powerful.... At any time, Aneita Jean would be dating at least three boys, usually more like five, and she would keep it all aboveboard, telling each man about the others, then watch as it drove them to lunacy....”

A Hollywood glamour-puss manque, Aneita Jean never made it out of West Virginia, despite her dreams of tinsel glory. Although she didn’t seek them out, marriage and motherhood came her way after all, even if they did not change her essentially narcissistic nature. Her husband, a hardworking local man who adored her, found himself having to act as mother and father to their three daughters. Aneita Jean wasn’t the maternal kind.

In trying to understand what made her grandmother tick, Allison Glock focuses on the ways in which Aneita Jean viewed her beauty as a tool: a one-way ticket out of Dullsville. But she also suggests that for Aneita Jean, the power to attract men became a kind of high in and of itself: “She liked these boys because her effect was measurable, perceptible. Because she knew when she was with them, and their breath quickened ... and their skin went clammy, that she existed, that she was real.”

In seeking out her grandmother’s personal history, Glock has also done some research on the history of the ceramics industry that was the mainstay of the town that Aneita Jean never quite managed to escape.

For there’s more to this memoir than a celebration of one woman’s narcissism. It is also a vivid evocation of the imperiled natural beauty of this region of mines and potteries, the hardships of the Depression and the charms of small-town life as well as its shibboleths, petty snobberies and sheer boredom. Glock writes with enormous zest, and her book is a delight to read: funny, forceful, down-to-earth. Her humor comes straight out of the classic American vein, a blend of tall-tale hyperbole and ironic understatement.

Amid all the color, flavor, comedy, verve and pathos, it is easy to overlook some minor irritations. Glock sometimes seems to subscribe to what might be called the determinist fallacy, as in this statement about the adolescent Aneita Jean:

“She did not know how to stop herself from feeling things. She was already becoming one of those women who attract men. Women whose every movement is watched and savored and who unfurl themselves to it like flags. And since she was built like Miss America, it wasn’t really her choice to make.” (One wants to ask: Whose choice was it, then?) But Glock’s writing is so vivacious and entertaining, her portrayal of character, time and place so vivid, that few readers are likely to cavil.