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Looking for Love in All the Right Places
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10484 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
3,687 Words |
| Author
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Carol Troy
Carol Troy is the author of Cheep Chic. |
Gail Donohue Storey's real-life story swerves unnervingly into the fast-lane of her thirty something heroine, Colleen Sweeny. A Houston woman, Colleen has the body of an aerobics instructor and the job of a librarian. Like Colleen, Storey is a trained librarian.
Storey's mother was a librarian at the Cambridge Public Library near Harvard, and her father once worked as a librarian in the Army. After working at Chicago's Newberry Library, Storey went on to get her MLS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While getting a second master's degree in education from St. John's College in Annapolis, she directed the local library's outreach service called "Care-a-Van," an experience that is directly reflected in the novel. Storey then hightailed it to Houston and its famed writing program, where she got her third master's and turned to fiction under the mentorship of writer Donald Barthelme.
Before writing The Lord's Motel she was administrative director of the Houston writing program, turned to Vipassana (insight) meditation in the mid eighties, and met a hospice doctor by the name of Porter Storey.
The story of the novel
The Lord's Motel is the story of Colleen, 33, a Houston librarian who runs an outreach program called "Service to the Unserved," delivering books to homebound people, nursing homes, and jail and prison inmates.
Colleen, a Boston native and Catholic school survivor, now lives in a Houston building called "The Lord's Motel," so-named by the building's New Age manager, St. Francis, for the way he sees people "always driving in and out of the mind of God."
Colleen, as usual, is in love with a classic Mr. Wrong, Web Desiderio. He is social director on a cruise ship and she sees him only between cruises. In her desperation to be loved and to discover the connection between love and genuine eroticism, she follows Web blindly into kinky sex and various sexual misadventures.
Eventually, she's arrested for what looks like prostitution at a bachelor party in Galveston. Web leaves her in the lurch and she spends a terrifying night alone in jail.
Colleen then meets and falls in love with Mr. Right, Gabriel Benedict, an emergency room doctor.
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