Cease to Blush

Hugely entertaining, irreverent and challenging, Billie Livingston's new novel drives the bumpy road from the burlesque stages of Rat Pack Vegas to the bedroom Internet porn scenes of today, exploring just how far women have really come. Vivian is late to her own mother's funeral. Wearing a skintight lipstick-red suit, Vivian stands out like a pornographer's dream amongst the raven collection of West Coast intellectuals mourning the untimely death of the famous feminist Josie Callwood. Self-medicating grief with vodka, Vivian can't help trying to stick her finger in the eye of her dead mother's expectations. Dead people have a hard time protecting their secrets, and Josie has left one big surprise for her troubled daughter. When she opens a trunk in her mother's basement, Vivian discovers that Josie wasn't who she seemed and that she had a flaming sexual past more exotic than anything Vivian has been able to pull off. Chasing the lies her mother told her, Vivian sets off on a road trip in which memory, reality and imagination collide to recreate the kaleidoscope world of America in the sixties. In disbelief and dawning admiration, she follows her mother's trail through the Vegas nexus where movie stars, pop singers, strippers, politicians and the mob mingled, where the Rat Pack ruled and girls were arm and eye candy. As she uncovers her mother's true story, Vivian ends up confronting her own sexual lies and spiritual evasions. Billie Livingston's fine novel leads us to consider the nature of our hidden desires and to question whether the sky would really fall if we admitted our true needs and ceased to blush. Excerpt fromCease to Blush: I have read that people women often come to some understanding with their mothers, in their thirties. Things always take me longer. I had anticipated this scorpion dance of ours might fade away in my forties. But she hadn't given me the luxury of time. I was furious with her for it. I was always furious with her, but this was the capper. She had never wanted me to find things out for myself she was always pushing and prodding me to become some kind of starkly sensible brain-on-legs. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. When I graduated high school and started modelling, she patiently enunciated, "You're a smart young woman. Why waste something so precious prancing around for the camera, looking like a drag queen." My clever comeback: "Well, there's 'sposed to be a Playboy scout coming to town. Then I could wear less and make more." I tapped my temple. "Always thinking, see." From the Hardcover edition.

Billie Livingston published her critically acclaimed first novel, Going Down Swinging, in 2000. Her first book of poetry, The Chick at the Back of the Church, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award. Her award-winning short fiction has been published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and her short story collection, You Sound Tiny, is forthcoming from Random House Canada. Born in Toronto, Livingston now lives in Vancouver.


From the Hardcover edition.