Novels and Navels
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Abstract
Once upon a time, there was a little boy and he had a whole bunch of adventures. Needless to say, his mother was dead. Or else, like Pinocchio, he didn't have a mother at all. Once upon a time there was a little boy and a little girl and they had a whole bunch of adventures. Needless to say, their mother was dead and their stepmother was trying to kill them. Once upon a time there was a little girl and she had a whole bunch of adventures. Her mother wasn't dead; as a matter of fact her mother loved her and also loved her mother, who was the little girl's grandmother, and she warned the little girl to stay away from adventures but the little girl didn't listen to her and she got into some very deep trouble and some say she never got out of it again and others say she had to be helped out of it by a man. Same for a whole bunch of other little girls whose mothers were dead and who would have been murdered by their stepmothers, stepsisters and jealous fairy godmothers had not a man stepped in in the nick of time. However, this is supposed to be not a storytelling session but an article. A piece, not of fiction but of nonfiction. So let us jump outside the story to the moral that always comes immediately after it. The moral of the story is, clearly, that mothers and adventure, fafait deunc) asthe French would put it. They simply do not go together. If you want to have an adventure, which necessarily entails risking your neck, you must at all costs get away from your motherwho, invariably, predictably, boringly, wants to save your neck. Adventure is described by Sara Ruddick in her