There's an annual "worst opening line of a novel" contest out there--named, fairly or not, for Bulwer-Lytton. The "winners" get forwarded me sometimes--but they're made up.
This isn't made up. It couldn't be.
This has to be one of the most dreadful opening sentences I've ever read--and it's in fact from Bill Clinton's summer blockbuster "My Life:"
"Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about 6,000 in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana."His publishers spent millions on the advance for this book, and millions more on promotion. There wasn't even a little spare change left over for someone to actually edit the thing? Good lord. There are at least three sentences there, maybe four.
Almost makes me nostalgic for Nixon's memoir "RN," which cut to the chase with now-admirable concision: "I was born in the house my father built."
No comments:
Post a Comment