Book Review: Still Having Fun
Still Having Fun: A Portrait of the Military Marriage of Rex and Bettie George 1941-2007. Candace George Thompson. Published: Westview, Inc., Kingston Springs, TN, 2012, 305 pp.
Reviewed by Vicky Edwards.
Writing a memoir is a tricky business. If you’re not famous, you have to make strangers care about you or your family. If you’re writing about events that happened when you weren’t present, you have to breathe life into the facts. Ultimately, you have to disconnect enough from the dramatic events of your own life to share uncomfortable truths in a way that is both passionate and dispassionate.
Candace George Thompson succeeds to some degree on all these levels in “Still Having Fun: A Portrait of the Military Marriage of Rex and Bettie George 1941-2007.”
Thompson’s father, Rex, was a career Air Force officer who began service on D-Day. His courtship with the popular Bettie Gibson is reminiscent of Amanda Wingfield’s memories of her “gentlemen callers” in “The Glass Menagerie”: the interested parties were lined up on Bettie’s front porch as she came in from one date and changed clothes to go on the next one. In fact, she was engaged to someone else when Rex won her heart.
The opening sections of the book, however, suffer from their archival quality. Events are noted, personal family letters are shared, and her father’s tape-recorded memories are included, verbatim, but it seldom rises above the level of a documentation of family ancestry and into the level of compelling reading. The endnotes do a neat job of putting Rex’s service into the larger historical context, but perhaps that information would be better integrated into the text.
A notable exception is the heartbreaking story of Bettie giving birth to a stillborn baby in 1942. The stunning insensitivity with which medical personnel treated the event is a throwback to an era of “Just don’t talk about it and it will go away,” with the hospital staff routinely taking the baby from a sedated mother who never gets to hold her own child. Grief unacknowledged is grief that lingers, as Bettie’s does throughout her life.
Once the story enters the 1950s, the narrative picks up with the author’s ability to remember the events she is describing. If you have ever wondered, as I have, that children can be unaware of their own father’s alcoholism, Candace’s surprise and her growing understanding that her father has a problem is convincing; his dysfunction is quietly kept in the shadows and Bettie’s distress has been kept to herself. It may not have been easy for the author to “out” her father to the public, but it was a necessary admission and aided reader understanding of the path addiction sometimes takes.
The final chapters focusing on Bettie’s cognitive decline are also heartbreakingly honest, and the author does a remarkable job of making us understand Bettie’s denial and frustrations, as well as the immense job that Rex undertook as her unfailing caretaker.
Overall, this memoir does a credible job of blending historical perspective with the personal story of two people that the reader feels he or she would like to have met.
Candace George Thompson spent her childhood moving around the country, and served in Venezuela as a Peace Corps volunteer, before settling down in Chicago, where she has lived for over 30 years.