Garbo Laughs

Front Cover
Taylor & Francis, Sep 8, 2004 - Nature - 308 pages
This is a novel about movie love. Set in Ottawa in the 1990s, it is the quixotic tale of tall, thin Harriet Browning, inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. Harriet is a woman so saturated with the movies, seen repeatedly and swallowed whole, that she no longer fits into this world. Bent on seeing everything she has missed, she forms a Friday night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named Dinah for Dinah Shore. Breaking in upon this quiet backwater, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood, the faded widow of a famous screenwriter and her movie-expert stepson. They are Harsh Reality. With them come blackouts, arguments, accidents, illness and sudden death. But what chance does real life stand when we can watch movies instead? What hope does real love have when movie love, in all its brief intensity, is an easy option? In this comedy of secondhand desire, movies and movie lovers come first.

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Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
5
Section 3
17
Section 4
40
Section 5
48
Section 6
55
Section 7
70
Section 8
76
Section 13
137
Section 14
154
Section 15
187
Section 16
208
Section 17
217
Section 18
236
Section 19
248
Section 20
274

Section 9
97
Section 10
118
Section 11
120
Section 12
123
Section 21
287
Section 22
293
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About the author (2004)

Elizabeth Hay is the author of five books, including Small Change and A Student of Weather. Her books have been shortlisted for a number of awards, including Canada's two most prestigious, The Governor General's Award and the Giller Prize. She recently won the Marian Engle Award for a woman writer in mid-career. She lives in Ottawa.

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