Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright Book

This biography of Dare Wright had a lot of flaws, but a year later the story's still imprinted in my generally flaky memory, and I can't deny that I sat down and inadvertently read the whole thing in one sitting, sooooo.... The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll is definitely a four-star book. I don't think Jean Nathan's the greatest biographer who's ever lived, and I felt her pop-Freudian analysis of Wright left a lot to be desired (okay, it annoyed the crap out of me, though that's a personal pet peeve), but Nathan does deserve real recognition for unearthing the hitherto untold story of this extremely fascinating woman.

Dare Wright is the author of a famous 1957 picture book for small children. If you don't know it, The Lonely Doll is a memorably creepy story illustrated by black and white photographs, about a blonde doll who lives unhappily all alone until two bears come to stay with her. The story contains lots of dress up, an infamous spanking scene, and a profound childhood fear of abandonment -- in other words, it's made to order for the twisted, confused brains of little girls. The book's rather lovely and artful and sick and clearly meant to sear itself deeply into the mushy psyches of young readers. If you haven't looked at it, you should. There is also a bunch of Lonely Doll sequels.

And of course it turns out that Wright herself had quite a uniquely twisted psyche of her own. Her life is truly in the realm of too-disturbing-for-a-storybook, too-bizarre-to-make-up. The perennial girl-child of a creepy, Svengali-like mother, Wright seems to have lived the life of a doll as much as a human being could. She was a model and photographer who actually seems to have existed more in the fantasy worlds she created and photographed than she did in real life, where Wright seems to have been profoundly uncomfortable. In addition to a bizarrely enmeshed relationship with her mother, Wright also had a very close, quasi-romantic relationship with her brother, and after a brief courtship in her youth never married or consummated any romantic relationship. She presumably starved herself throughout her entire life to maintain a thin, childlike figure, and suffered a complete mental breakdown when her mother finally died. Wright's last years are almost unbearably tragic to read about (and are not treated with much insight here, IMHO), and are practically an ad for better social service funding. Some of the most interesting themes of Dare Wright's life -- art, representation, gender, etc. -- might not be adequately explored in this book, but they're so unavoidable and the story's so fascinating that this doesn't matter much. The narrative is very well-told, though I did find the author's decision to end the book with her personal story very jarring, and wished she'd put it at the beginning instead of the end. Still, as I mentioned above, I accidentally read this book last year in one sitting -- flipped it open to look and didn't manage to close it until I was done-- which definitely recommends the thing highly. Nathan does do a fantastic job of immersing the reader in Wright's completely bizarre and enchanting world (think brother-and-sister-separated-at-birth trying to marry, New York in the fifties, a demented version of Eloise....) and I was very sad at the end to leave it.

I agree with Tosh that Wright is a really interesting artist, and I'd love to see her work get more attention.... which hopefully it will pretty soon! I'm excited to see that Julian Schabel's working on a movie about Dare Wright. The fact that Jean Nathan's isn't going to be the last word on Wright helps me fully appreciate the work she did in uncovering this story. Honestly, I'm sure Nathan did a fine job, and some of the ways she chose to approach this just grated on me for personal reasons having to do with my professional biases. If you're not irritated by glib Freudian summaries of people's serious psychiatric problems, you will absolutely love this book. Hell, even if you are, you'll probably love it anyway; I did!