Pamela Moore (author)
Encyclopedia
Pamela Moore was an American writer educated at Rosemary Hall
and Barnard College
. Her first book, Chocolates for Breakfast, was published when she was 18 and became an international best seller. At the time, it was often associated with Bonjour Tristesse
, a novel published two years earlier in France by Françoise Sagan
, also aged 18.Since its publication in 1956, Chocolates for Breakfast appeared in eleven languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Swedish, German and Italian. According to the Bantam paperback edition, the book went through 11 printings in the U.S. and sold over one million copies.
"...not very long ago, it would have been regarded as shocking to find girls in their teens reading the kind of books they’re now writing.” The book also includes discussion of homosexuality, alcoholism, gender roles and sexual exploration that was, for the era, uncommon.
After a visit to a psychiatrist, she leaves school and joins her mother in Hollywood. As her single mother struggles financially and professionally, Courtney is repeatedly called on to take care of her and manage their situation. She also takes up with her mother's friend Barry Cabot, a bisexual actor, with whom she has an affair, though he breaks it off to return to his male lover.
Courtney and her mother move to New York, where the mother hopes to get work in television and where Courtney's father Robbie might be able to give them more support. There she is reunited with her friend Janet, They go from cocktail parties at the Stork to all night "coming out" parties for debutants on Long Island. Courtney becomes fascinated by one of Janet's friends, Anthony Neville, an aristocratic esthete who lives out of the Plaza hotel and has homes in the Riviera and the Caribbean. She and Anthony become lovers, but hide this from Janet, who was involved with Anthony in the past.
Most of the characters in the book are heavy drinkers, with the exception of Courtney and a young man named Charles Cunningham, who gradually emerges as a love interest, although Courtney initially finds him too "straight arrow." Janet's father stands out as an alcoholic who "no longer cared for the niceties of companionship or ice in his bourbon." He regularly beats down the door behind which his wife and daughter hide from his rages. Janet leaves home to live first with Courtney, and then with a lover, before coming back to confront her home life once more. Her mother has fled to a sanitarium and her father is alone and drunk, and blames his daughter for ruining their lives. "Coldly, with the full force of his body, he slapped her...He fell upon her and forced her onto the couch and lay above her as a lover might, and she was terrified. This was too strange and too strong for her, her father lying on her body in control of her...As her body went limp in his arms he rose and walked over to the window. Thank God, she thought. Thank God he got up. " Soon after, Janet jumps from the window to her death.
In the aftermath, Courtney ends her affair with Anthony. Anthony is understanding. "It isn't a tragedy, angel. People like you, and me, and Janet — we're not capable of tragedy. This was no epic play, with heroic characters and vast emotions. This was not a tragedy. It was a child's game that came to an end." "But I feel a little sad," she said. "Now that it's here, I realize that I didn't want it to end." "In a sense it doesn't have to. You and I will end, of course. But the beauty of it never lay in the characters. It was the enchantment that made it precious."
The novel ends with Courtney on her way to see Charles Cunningham and her parents for dinner, while Anthony contemplates returning to his island in the Fall. "How quickly the summer had gone."
, for the depiction of the relationship of two schoolgirls at an East Coast boarding school -- the protagonist Courtney Farrell and her best friend Janet Parker -- the strong bond between Courtney and her teacher Miss Rosen, and the backlash against them from the other boarding school teachers and students. A detailed exploration of this genre, with a footnote linking Moore to the French tradition, appears in "Contingent loves: Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality" by Melanie Hawthorne.In The Catalog Of Cool, filmmaker Richard Blackburn includes Chocolates for Breakfast which he describes as "the ultimate teen sophisticate fantasy." Writer Rachel Shukert selected a passage from Chocolates for Breakfast as her inclusion in an anthology of Erotic writing, calling it "a product of an all-too-brief vogue for novels about sexually precocious poor little rich girls."
Musician Courtney Love
claims that her mother named her after the protagonist of "Chocolates for Breakfast". As Robert Nedelkoff points out in his retrospective on the literary and social significance of Moore's work, the name Courtney became common as a girl's name only in the years after the novel's publication.
Rosemary Hall (Greenwich, Connecticut)
Rosemary Hall was an independent girls school in Greenwich, Connecticut, in Fairfield County, Connecticut. It was later merged into Choate Rosemary Hall and moved to the Choate boys' school campus in Wallingford, in New Haven County, Connecticut....
and Barnard College
Barnard College
Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...
. Her first book, Chocolates for Breakfast, was published when she was 18 and became an international best seller. At the time, it was often associated with Bonjour Tristesse
Bonjour Tristesse
Bonjour Tristesse is a novel by Françoise Sagan. Published in 1954, when the author was only 18, it was an overnight sensation...
, a novel published two years earlier in France by Françoise Sagan
Françoise Sagan
Françoise Sagan – real name Françoise Quoirez – was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Hailed as "a charming little monster" by François Mauriac on the front page of Le Figaro, Sagan was known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois...
, also aged 18.Since its publication in 1956, Chocolates for Breakfast appeared in eleven languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Swedish, German and Italian. According to the Bantam paperback edition, the book went through 11 printings in the U.S. and sold over one million copies.
Chocolates for Breakfast
Chocolates for Breakfast gained notoriety for its frank depiction of sexuality at a time when 18 year old girls were not expected to write or even read about such topics. The protagonist is a young girl named Courtney, coming of age as her parents divorce, splitting her time between two coasts. Her father is a member of the genteel New York publishing world, while her mother pursues a fading acting career in Hollywood. The book portrays a privileged and jaded set who drink heavily and pride themselves on their sexual sophistication. After an unrequited crush on one of her boarding school teachers leads to heartbreak, Courtney beds a bisexual Hollywood actor and a dissolute European aristocrat living out of a New York hotel. As Robert Clurman noted in The New York Times Book ReviewThe New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
"...not very long ago, it would have been regarded as shocking to find girls in their teens reading the kind of books they’re now writing.” The book also includes discussion of homosexuality, alcoholism, gender roles and sexual exploration that was, for the era, uncommon.
Plot Summary
The book opens with the Courtney Farrel and her best friend Janet Parker at a New England boarding school. Vacation has just ended, and Courtney is glad to be back at school and away from the tension of being between her divorced parents. Janet is desperately misses the parties and the boys she left behind in New York. They argue over Courtney's excessive visits to her English teacher Miss Rosen, whom Janet derides as "queer." Later Miss Rosen is pressured by the school to not talk to Courtney outside of class, and Courtney subsequently falls into a depression.After a visit to a psychiatrist, she leaves school and joins her mother in Hollywood. As her single mother struggles financially and professionally, Courtney is repeatedly called on to take care of her and manage their situation. She also takes up with her mother's friend Barry Cabot, a bisexual actor, with whom she has an affair, though he breaks it off to return to his male lover.
Courtney and her mother move to New York, where the mother hopes to get work in television and where Courtney's father Robbie might be able to give them more support. There she is reunited with her friend Janet, They go from cocktail parties at the Stork to all night "coming out" parties for debutants on Long Island. Courtney becomes fascinated by one of Janet's friends, Anthony Neville, an aristocratic esthete who lives out of the Plaza hotel and has homes in the Riviera and the Caribbean. She and Anthony become lovers, but hide this from Janet, who was involved with Anthony in the past.
Most of the characters in the book are heavy drinkers, with the exception of Courtney and a young man named Charles Cunningham, who gradually emerges as a love interest, although Courtney initially finds him too "straight arrow." Janet's father stands out as an alcoholic who "no longer cared for the niceties of companionship or ice in his bourbon." He regularly beats down the door behind which his wife and daughter hide from his rages. Janet leaves home to live first with Courtney, and then with a lover, before coming back to confront her home life once more. Her mother has fled to a sanitarium and her father is alone and drunk, and blames his daughter for ruining their lives. "Coldly, with the full force of his body, he slapped her...He fell upon her and forced her onto the couch and lay above her as a lover might, and she was terrified. This was too strange and too strong for her, her father lying on her body in control of her...As her body went limp in his arms he rose and walked over to the window. Thank God, she thought. Thank God he got up. " Soon after, Janet jumps from the window to her death.
In the aftermath, Courtney ends her affair with Anthony. Anthony is understanding. "It isn't a tragedy, angel. People like you, and me, and Janet — we're not capable of tragedy. This was no epic play, with heroic characters and vast emotions. This was not a tragedy. It was a child's game that came to an end." "But I feel a little sad," she said. "Now that it's here, I realize that I didn't want it to end." "In a sense it doesn't have to. You and I will end, of course. But the beauty of it never lay in the characters. It was the enchantment that made it precious."
The novel ends with Courtney on her way to see Charles Cunningham and her parents for dinner, while Anthony contemplates returning to his island in the Fall. "How quickly the summer had gone."
Subsequent cultural references
Chocolates for Breakfast is sometimes included in lists of early Lesbian FictionLesbian fiction
Lesbian fiction is a subgenre of fiction that involves one or more primary female homosexual character and lesbian themes. Novels that fall into this category may be of any genres, such as, but not limited to, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance.-History:The first...
, for the depiction of the relationship of two schoolgirls at an East Coast boarding school -- the protagonist Courtney Farrell and her best friend Janet Parker -- the strong bond between Courtney and her teacher Miss Rosen, and the backlash against them from the other boarding school teachers and students. A detailed exploration of this genre, with a footnote linking Moore to the French tradition, appears in "Contingent loves: Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality" by Melanie Hawthorne.In The Catalog Of Cool, filmmaker Richard Blackburn includes Chocolates for Breakfast which he describes as "the ultimate teen sophisticate fantasy." Writer Rachel Shukert selected a passage from Chocolates for Breakfast as her inclusion in an anthology of Erotic writing, calling it "a product of an all-too-brief vogue for novels about sexually precocious poor little rich girls."
Musician Courtney Love
Courtney Love
Courtney Michelle Love is an American rock musician. Love is the lead vocalist, lyricist, and rhythm guitarist for alternative rock band Hole, which she formed in 1989, and is an actress who has moved from bit parts in Alex Cox films to significant and acclaimed roles in The People vs...
claims that her mother named her after the protagonist of "Chocolates for Breakfast". As Robert Nedelkoff points out in his retrospective on the literary and social significance of Moore's work, the name Courtney became common as a girl's name only in the years after the novel's publication.
Moore's later life and career
In 1958, Moore married Adam Kanarek, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin who had "very little in common with the residents of Beverly Hills, the Westchester horse set, and the habitues of '21' and the Stork Club." Moore went on to write four more novels, including Pigeons of St. Mark's Place, The Exile of Suzy-Q, and The Horsy Set, but none of these enjoyed the success of the first. Some reviewers have noted, in the depiction of depression and suicide in "Chocolates," and the frantic mood swings of Brenda in "The Horsy Set," intimations of a bipolar disorder, for which diagnosis and treatment were at the time nearly non-existent. In 1963 Pamela Moore gave birth to a son. Nine months later, in 1964, while at work on her final, unpublished novel Kathy on the Rocks, she committed suicide by gunshot.External references
- Pamela Moore in the New York Times From "With Hidden Noise" by Dan Visel