Well, colour me surprised, but I loved this.I was told it was trash. I went into it expecting to be mildly entertained. True, there is a very definite target audience and as a general rule it has a vagina, but I had so much fun with this book.Which one of you bitches is my mother?Thus does Lili, famous gorgeous actress, attempt to find out from four women which of them is her birth mother. The women, Maxine, Judy, Kate and Pagan, went to finishing school in Switzerland in the late 40s. One of them got pregnant and had a baby, which got put up for fostering. Lace follows the four potential mothers, and the daughter, as they grow up. They all do exciting things, and difficult things, and spend a lot of time hopping to and fro across the Atlantic, and all but one of them gets married at least once. There are a miscellany of men, who are pretty much all secondary characters, and some of them are awful and some of them are lovely. By the time it got to the end, I had narrowed down the potential mother to one of two, and of those two it was not the one I had expected.I don't really read books for sex (I swear! shut up), so I was far more interested in the gooey relationship and Career!Woman stuff than anything else. I have three observations to make on that front: 1) there wasn't as much sex as I had been led to believe, 2) apparently it is quite easy to overuse the word 'erotic' as a descriptor, and 3) the goldfish scene is indelibly burnt into my memory and that is NOT HOT, GUYS. NOT HOT AT ALL. YKINMK, apparently, but I stand by the fact that GOLDFISH ARE NOT MY IDEA OF A GOOD TIME. Good grief.That aside, Lace is very much a product of its time, in terms of content as much as in terms of style. There's a very good article in the Guardian about how it's actually quite feminist, which basically sums up a lot of the reasons I enjoyed it. I really recommend the article, if you have ten minutes.I think I also enjoyed this book because I came to it at the right moment - right now, I've just finished my degree(s), and I'm trying to work out what to do with my life. I identify a lot with some aspects of all the characters, in terms of how they react to where they are in life, and what they want to do with it. I'm glad I read this now, because it was remarkably reassuring. I wonder, if I come back to it in a decade's time, whether I will think the same thing. (It is, after all, quite a sheltered novel about very sheltered and privileged people - on which more in a second.) I also wonder how much more it will have dated in another decade, because it really has dated in the last 30 years. That didn't at all detract from how much I loved it, though - in fact, I think that escapism of being set in a different world to the world of 2012 made the bits I did identify with resonate more.Let's talk briefly about how sheltered and privileged the characters in this book - and the book itself - are. And that is, very. They do well, when they want for money it is not on a desperate level, and they make up for it with luck, and influence. I don't even care how privileged it is, it's escapism. The world that Conran writes is clearly one she has grown up in. She's been to a Swiss finishing school. She can spot vulgarity at sixty paces. She describes the outfits of every character with a relish unparalleled in the sex scenes, and it's marvellous. Surprisingly, that doesn't grate with me at all - there's some quality to the book that just feels really observed. I am a bit of a snob about my describers of old money - it's very difficult to pretend, and Conran's rich set sounds right, in some indefinable way. I liked it.When I picked up Lace, I expected it to be the sort of thing I'd file under 'guilty pleasure,' or 'books I like but would never be seen reading.' I know a lot of people, after all, who would roll their eyes at how much I enjoyed it. But I did enjoy it, very much indeed, and I can think of several friends to whom I will almost certainly be recommending it. Interestingly, at least two of those are people I met as a teenager at school. Four stars.
Four elegant, successful, sophisticated women in their forties have been called to New York to meet Lili, the world-famous movie actress.Already a legend despite her youth, Lili is beautiful, passionate, notoriously temperamental... Each of the four has a reason to hate Lili. And each of them is astonished to see the others; for they are old friends who first met in school, old friends who share a guilty secret - old friends whose lives are changed when Lili suddenly confronts them and asks, "Which one of you bitches is my mother?"The answer to this question - a question that has obsessed and almost destroyed Lili - is at the heart of Lace. As the reader travels from an elegant Swiss finishing school in Gstaad to the glittering places where the rich and successful congregate, the book traces not only the life of Lili herself - abandoned, seduced, exploited, but at last rising to triumph as a star - but the lives of the four women, one of whom is her mother.The blurb actually goes on for several more paragraphs, and I was tempted to include them, because I wanted to point out a few things in there that make me wonder if whoever wrote the blurb actually read the book, but anyway.I don't actually have all that much to say about the book, although I enjoyed it. It fits a formula, that of 3 or four women who meet in school and become close friends. They're all wealthy, except one, who either marries into wealth by the end or creates her own. One of the wealthy ones has been raised to feel perpetually inadequate. One of them's foreign. There's bound to be some exotic royalty (sometimes one of the women, sometimes someone else). And there's some sort of secret scandal, usually involving somebody's pregnancy. It's good light chick reading, although not as light as, say, the Shopaholic series.This particular incarnation of that formula was actually quite good. Well-developed, believable characters, in well-written situations. I was starting to think Conran had issues with men, but all the girls eventually found love, and I guess we all go through a few Mr. Wrongs before we find Mr. Right.One thing I did think was really kind of neat about this book was the way she depicted female friendship. In fiction, female friendships are almost always torn apart somehow when they feature so prominently in a story. The deeper the friendship is portrayed in the beginning, the more likely it is to fall apart by the end. This one didn't. The four women went their separate ways after school, but remained close friends who stayed in contact, visited often, and were always there for each other if one of them needed help. There was one blip between two of them, but as soon as they figured out that it was engineered by th guy involved, they immediately picked up where they left off, with no lingering feelings of resentment or suspicion. Right to the end, they protect each other. After Lili finds out which one is her mother, and wants to know who her father is, the mother hides the truth to avoid hurting both Lili and one of the other three (even though it was ancient history), and all three know she's lying, for various reasons, but instead of suspecting the worst, they believe that she has good reasons, and not one of them calls her on it. It's nice to see female friendship portrayed like that, because that really is how the really good ones are.I've learned that there's a sequel, in which Lili goes looking for her father (the stated father is dead, so I guess she learns that that wasn't true after all?), and I think I'm going to read that, because there really were good reasons for her mother to keep that information to herself, so I'm actually quite curious how all that's going to go down.
What do You think about Lace (1992)?
Recently, I've been feeling nostalgic for all those books that were made into mini-series in the 80s and impulsively ordered Lace from my local library. I haven't read the book since I saw the mini-series (starring a gorgeous young Phoebe Cates) and I wasn't really sure what to expect. I was surprised to find that not only is this book compulsively readable, it is also a work of feminism. Conran is ruthless in exploring the rape culture of her generation - every single one of the female characters is affected by rape culture over and over again. '"Don't cry, little bird, " he murmured, "why this weeping? The first time there is always pain, little bird." Like many men he didn't regard rape as rape if it didn't happen in a back alley and there weren't any bruises.'This book isn't just entertaining and fun and sexy (because there are also juicy yummy sex scenes), it's also a real testament to the white middle class woman's experience of rape culture in the years after World War II. This book has been undeservedly classed as trashy, most likely because it is a bestseller written by a woman that involves love, sex and romance. But Shirley Conran and this novel deserve to be reconsidered.
—Mei-Lu
I don't know why there are so many saying this is "trashy". I didn't find it to be at all. I though it was a well plotted book, and pretty skilfully done. It's almost puts you as a reader in the place of a detective, given that you know what's going to happen right at the beginning and then you're sort of connecting up the pieces all the way through. I did find it to be quite long though (there are 754 pages), which I guess makes sense given the sheer amount of stuff that happens in it. It manages to take you through 5 entire lifetimes, which left me at the end with the uneasy feeling that life really is very short. Also, there was quite a lot of vocabulary relating to fabric and fashion which I didn't know, which a nice opportunity to learn that vocabulary even if it did distract me from the story at times.In general a pretty good read.
—Alex
"Which one of you bitches is my mother?" Simple literary genius! We've all heard lines in movies that have stuck with us forever, but this was the first time I'd read a book and had that happen to me! My love of literature began early in my life, but Shirley Conrans' Lace was one of the first novels that got me excited and hence I remember it vividly (although I re-read it recently, just to be sure you see). But as an enthusiastic teen I read the book and then I awaited the mini-series of the same name with baited breath. Because if they didn't use that line... well they just HAD to! I was not disappointed. (I maintain firmly that one should always read the book BEFORE one watches any re-enactment of it! NO EXCEPTIONS! And this is not the last time you will hear me say this!) But back to Lace...As a teenager I loved Lily! I wanted to BE Lily! She had been hard done by, she had a terrible upbringing, but she was not going to let that stop her being who she wanted to be and by God, she would make those accountable for her misfortunes pay! And she always got what she wanted.Lace is a great story, about women, our fierce love and protective instincts for our children, our lovers, and our girlfriends as well as our abilities, our talents and our passions. Of the four possible mothers of Lily my bet was with Pagan. I identified with Pagan, like me, she was rebellious, questioning of the rules (just because it's always been that way, doesn't mean it always should be) and sometimes she got things terribly wrong. The characters in Lace are all like this, they have very realistic and human qualities, imperfections that endear them to us as we can see ourselves in there somewhere. But there was just a 25% chance of my being right about Pagan, after all there was Judy, the poor American girl, Maxine, the wealthy French girl and Kate, the English girl (like Pagan) to consider. The four friends had made a pact many years ago to never reveal which one of them was actually pregnant. But Lily wanted to know, and she would stop at nothing to find out. So, was I right about Pagan? And did Lily find out who her mother was? Well, that would be telling.You'll have to read it to find out. And when you do... OMG... look out for the bit with the goldfish!
—Min Wright
