“Her Inner Jersey Girl”
By Cathi Hanauer
THE NEWARK STAR LEDGER, August 7, 2005
Also adapted for Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State, edited by Irina Reyn
If it's true you can never go home again, it's got to be equally true you can never really leave. At least, not if you're me and the place you're trying to kiss good-bye is New Jersey. I've been gone for almost 25 years now, and I certainly can't imagine ever moving back, although every time I visit my parents in West Orange (that's 145 on the Parkway) and drive by the old Mitola's, where I spent high school lunch periods snarfing roast beef subs with vinegar, oil, and extra mayo on a mountain of meat atop a football-sized roll, believe me, I'm tempted. And yet, with each year and mile I put between myself and my Jersey childhood—and with all the places I've lived since (London, New York State, New York City, Arizona, Manhattan again, and now western Massachusetts) —lately I find myself admitting, if not actually offering up, that I'm a Jersey Girl.
Go figure. Because for years—and I apologize in advance for this confession—I tried desperately to deny, or at least disguise, my suburban New Jersey roots. To me, this took the form of wearing looser clothes (I could zip them without lying down!), lower shoes (who knew girls could actually bend their knees when they walked?), jeans without large designer labels displayed prominently on my butt. I cut my "big" hair into a bob (I looked all wrong, like Deborah Winger in Betrayed), listened to girl bands from down south, ate thick-crust pizza you couldn't fold down the middle if you tried, and bought a Volvo. (Gag! My high school friends wouldn't dare be seen with me.) And yet, here I am, middle-aged, with a dog named "Rosalita" (yes, after Bruce's Rosalita), my hair long and wild again, and a feeling of dismay when my children, Manhattan-born and Massachusetts-raised, pronounce water as "wah-ter" or coffee "cah-fee." I want to yell, "It's WOR-ter! It's CAW-fee! What are you, from Chi-CAW-go?!"
Both of my novels—written ten years apart—are set in the Jersey suburbs: the first, My Sister's Bones, in West Berry, loosely based on West Orange; the new one, Sweet Ruin, in an unnamed Jersey commuter hub that's a cross between Maplewood, Montclair, and the New England college town where I live now. It's not that I haven't tried other fictional settings—midtown Manhattan, Tucson's desert—but they just didn't have the character of New Jersey… or characters, I should say. There isn't a "type" I've observed from any of these places (no, not even New York) who's as distinctive, lively, and frankly just plain funny as the people I remember from Jersey and the fictional characters they've spawned for me. "Cindi and Joey," for example. She's a sun-worshipping single mother who says things like "I was hysterical crying" and calls everyone by a 3- or 4-syllable name (Cynthia, Zachariah) even if they don't actually have one; he's a newly Buddhist personal trainer who favors wrestling singlets, bumper stickers, and woven ankle bracelets. Let me tell you, I had more fun writing scenes with Cindi and Joey than just about anything else in that book. In Bones, there was the narrator's boyfriend, a wrestler named Vinnie DiNardio who was as wide as he was tall and said things like "don't get all hypodermic about it" but was a real peach; and the narrator's best friend, teenaged Tiffany Zefferelli, tough-talking daughter of a New Jersey bookie.
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