Like Venus Fading Book

Irene Matthews is born into an impoverished and abused childhood in the Depression-hit Harlem of the 1920s. Poor and uneducated, inspired by the atmosphere of the Harlem Renaissance and the blues of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, Irene dreams--but dares not hope--of becoming a showgirl. Aspirant grit and extraordinary circumstances combine, and Hollywood manufactures her dream through the decisive force of producer Samuel Gottlieb. She is reborn Irene O'Brien, sex symbol, Oscar-nominated movie star, and groundbreaking phenomenon, shattering the moulds of both the Black Mammie and White Bubble Gum Venus. Marsha Hunt's Like Venus Fading brilliantly depicts Irene's luminary ascent to--and harrowing descent from--fame. The novel movingly and incisively shows how Irene becomes a victim of the nightmare of Hollywood's inhumanity, and its racial anxieties and sexual fascination with black femininity (the real life Adelaide Hall, known as the "lightly-tanned Venus", and the legendary Josephine Baker, are near at hand as compound models for Hunt's fictional memoir). Irene revels in the apparent security of material wealth ("Pretty shoes always helped me look other people in the eye"), but finds that the price of her success is the burden of the intensely erotic image projected onto her exoticised body. Destroyed as a black star and a victim of her times, Irene remakes an anonymous identity under the stars on the roof of a young--and unlikely--saviour who challenges her with a new language of race consciousness and enables her to confront the final reality that "nobody knows us like we know ourselves." Hunt's study of fame and its costs is an utterly enthralling--and painfully well written--story, which exposes the ways in which racial myths continue to shape the perceptions of 20th-century America. --Rachel HolmesRead More