When Skylab was Falling
Sometimes when you travel through books, you follow roads that start at one point in time and lead back a hundred years and across an ocean. I arrived at Vanity Fair in England circa 1850, but I started in Connecticut in 1979, where a spoiled suburban girl was forced to read the book in her summer school class.
I enjoyed Ann Beattie’s (beet’-eez) novel Falling in Place
There really was a connection between the two books. They both had characters who were obsessed with appearances and the dramas of their small lives. But what really got me most about Falling in Place was how it magically transported me to the summer of ‘79 with Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” playing on the radio, posters of Peter Frampton on a teenage girl’s bedroom wall and news reports about Skylab falling to Earth.
Here’s a challenge, read the book and count the number of times someone or something is falling. Or just let yourself fall instead.