Capture Kinflicks Depicted By Lisa Alther Disseminated As Paper Copy

main details I remember from this book, which I read strictly for research purposes as a teenager, is that the heroine wore Villager blouses, which her father resented paying for, and had sex with inexplicably stupid partners.
There is also, if I remember correctly, a dumbass boyfriend who says "Do whut" all the time, and later, a distasteful scene with a greased cucumber.
Reading this book coincided with my own father's ultimate struggle and my struggle to understand it so perhaps it hit a little too close to home but I really liked it.
Maybe this also affects my giving it such a high rating, I don't know, . . Dumb book! I'm so mad I finished it! I kept hoping it would get better but no it didn't! The ending was horrible!!!!! Lots of exclamation points in my reviews!!! I can handle sad, haunting memoirs, and tragic, graphic novels BUT what I can't stand are stupid characters who never grow in the story or learn anything.
Maybe I am too young to grasp what the author was trying to say This book is nothing like what the back cover or the title describes! "Kinflicks" refers to the home movies her Mother took of her childhood.
When I saw that I thought of my Grandparents home videos of my Father, Aunts and Uncles and thought it would be about family! Duh NOPE! This chick goes from being a member of a youth church group to a lesbo hippie to a married to a man housewife and mother of one, to an adulteress runaway searching for her Vietnam deserter boyfriend then she ends up back home to watch her Mother die.
Oh and she rescues some baby birds along the way and they apparently are very important because she talks about them a lot! Then it ends and she still knows nothing! I killed brain cells reading this book.
no wonder it wascents on ibooks! Gotta love any book that uses ideopathic thrombocytopenic purpura as a plot device.

One of those books I was forcing myself to keep reading despite deriving no joy.
It's one of those that's "wellwritten for its time" Feels dated, I imagine it was quite edgy at one time though, Weird

This book was compelling enough that I continued reading it, hoping that it would get better.
Unfortunately, it never did. What a waste. Life's Big Questions

The tour of life that Lisa Alther provides for those of us who have begun to wonder is allencompassingand amazing, in the true, literal, and mostly forgotten sense of that word.
She tells Ginny Babcock Bliss's story superimposed against her dying mother's final thoughtsin words and images that range from the Big Bang theory to hippiedom and the attempt to raise a trio of abandoned baby birds.
And everything makes sense, logically follows from the thing before, and leads to the next thing.
This is truly wonderful storytelling, I rarely reread books, but I read this back when it first came out, and it is even more impressive today.
I'm off to find more of Lisa Alther's impressive work! Absolutely compelling! The first time I read it, I felt as though the author had extrapolated this book from my own life! Very relatable at least for me! I've enjoyed this book so much I've probably given found secondhand copies to at leastfriends over the years.
Every time I read it, I still enjoy it, A book of highfeminist ideals, of a sharply observed sixties sharp in the sense of acerbic, I think and of an epic character's lifespanning proportions.


I read this in my late teens/early twenties, picking it up for the blurb on the back, and despite myself at the time, loved it.
It was at once incredibly easy to read and yet full of ideas I hadn't really given due and proper consideration.
My mother raised me to be a feminist, in the sense of a believer in equality, but I hadn't really thought about it until this book.
And maybe my young self did use some of the ideas from this book as a way to impress women, but eventually those ideas stuck in a way that went beyond mere lipservice.


As someone who always felt I was born outoftime, and feeling I should really have been a teenager in the's, I loved this book.
In particular, Ginny's time at a commune highlighting some of the hypocrisies of the socalled 'love generation' and their limited interpretations of equality as well as her time at Berkeley studying Philosophy lead me to grow my hair long and study Philosophy, all the while trying to espouse an idealist egalitarian philosophy of my own.


I fully intend rereading this, just as soon as I can get it out of storage in the home of a woman I should have treated a whole lot better than I did.
I don't remember all the details, but I loved the wit, warmth and fierce intelligence of Lisa Alther and of the book.
Read "Confessions of a "Failed Southern Lady", by Florence King instead, I bought this book from a used book sale that was set up in the middle of the mall when I was.
Truth be told, I picked it up because the cover was slightly risque, and took it home because the description on the back made me think it would be a good read.
Now, at the age of, I have just finished reading it for the third time,

Kinflicks is the "comingofage" story of Virginia Ginny Babcock Bliss who, despite going through a plethora of experiences and just as many relationships, never really comes to know herself at all.
The hearttugging gem in this novel is the struggling relationship between dying mother and lost daughter.


In the past, I would have rated this book a five, and I really debated on whether I wanted to stick with that five.
This book has survived multiple unhauls over the years, and I've thought about it a number of times however, during this third and final read, there were several places that I had difficulty getting through, and even skipped over pages where things seemed to drag on.


I've decided on a solid rating of four, ONLY due to the slowness in those few places a real distraction that resulted in a long read with many breaks for me.


Overall, Lisa Alther delivered a witty and touching story that has stayed with me throughout the years.
This is one of my mom's favorite books, I could have sworn I'd already read it when I was younger, but then when I was staying at her house for a month in summerLisa Alther released a new book and we got to talking about this one and none of it was ringing a bell so I started to read it.
That's when I realized that I'd read the first few chapters, but nothing else was familiar so I must have given up on it.
I ended up putting it aside again but then came back to it almost a year later and actually finished it this time.
I'm glad I did! It's a truly epic story, and really just a massive character study.
There's not much plot to it, That sounds like it would be a bad thing, but Alther's characters are all so funny and richly developed that the book manages to be a good read anyway.
I wish it had come to a more satisfying conclusion, which is the main reason I docked a star but, again, character study, not plotbased, yadda, yadda, yadda.
It's a fun book, and I'm glad I finally read it all the way through, Lots of fun an entertaining novel that absorbed me completely, Having reread it afterodd years I am delighted to say I still give itstars.
A witty and at times uproariously funny 'feminist' text, it is also an interesting social commentary on US society

in thes ands.
Actually the era was one of "Women's Liberation" rather than 'feminist',
Alther's bildungsroman details one woman's journey from the deep South : " where men put women on pedestals and then used the pedestals as footstools", through a series of hetero and homosexual relationships, and identification with a number of competing ideologies, to a painful understanding of herself as an independant woman, mother and daughter.

This novel is seriously underrated and in my experience not terribly well known in Australia or New Zealand.

It is still liable to shock and offend some with its explicit sexual references however, it is well worth the read.
There are many reasons the current direction of the publishing industry is a shame, but one of the biggest is that it means fewer of sprawling, epic novels will be published unless, of course, they are written by someone like Tom Wolfe, which is an even bigger shame.
As a result, a novel like Kinflicks would probably never be published today,

Kinflicks reminded me a lot of one of my favorite books, Of Human Bondage by W.
Somerset Maugham, in that it is a comingofage novel that not only addresses the life of its protagonist, but that it also addresses Big Ideas and Big Institutions with more than a hint of irreverence.
Maugham had his go at theth century Parisian art world Alther takes her run at everything from smalltown teenage life in thes to separatistfeminist commune life and the sphere of domesticity in thes.
Nothing is offlimits. Everything is game for satire,

Mind you, just because she rips on the whole protoMWMF deal does not mean Alther is not a feminist.
On the contrary, I sometimes felt like I was being walloped about the head with her politics, which are straightup secondwave.
I actually thought it was pretty awesome, but I can see how others would be turned off by that.
Ditto for her frank discussion of sex, There is no fading to black, There is, however, a glowinthedark condom and an unfortunate incident with some handcuffs,

Which reminds me, this book also called to mind another writer I enjoy, John Irving, and probably more specifically, The World According to Garp.
It's more than just the secondwave milieu in which the novels are set, but also how people are killed or maimed in some pretty grotesque ways or the way every person or place is given a full backstory, complete with obsessions, tics, disfigurements, bizarre relationships, and so on.
Plus, Irving also writes novels that have scope, that cross decades and generations, that tell the stories of people's lives, which is exactly what Alther does here.


God, now I am sad for bygone literary eras, How annoying is that.

I would say that anyone who enjoys John Irving and who has a fascination with secondwave feminism like me! would enjoy reading this book.
I know I loved it, and I am glad I heard about it, because knowing that I could have gone my entire life without reading this book makes me very sad indeed.
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