Q’s Legacy by Helene Hanff

Q’s Legacy by Helene Hanff
paperback 192 pages
published by Little, Brown and Company in 1985
ISBN-13: 9780140089363

Type: {Impress Your Friends Read: noteable; prize-winner of all around intelligent crowd conversation piece)
Rating:{I’m Lovin’ It: Very Entertaining!}

Why You’re Reading It:

• You adore Helene Hanff and wish you could have met her (oh wait, that’s me)
• You like intelligent, funny women who were ahead of their time
• Glimpses into New York when it was all about writers and the theater are your bag
• Interesting, short non-fiction entertains you
• You’re smart

What I Thought:

I might always regret that I discovered Helene Hanff after she died. I had a good seventeen years on this Earth with her, and I couldn’t have found her then? Oh how I wish I had. I would have looked her up and visited, or written her a letter. She was the old-school type of writer who actually welcomed that sort of thing.

What a treat that she left behind: Q’s Legacy, her autodidactic story of educating herself through literature after she was only able to complete one year of college because of funding. What an inspiration to read her story as she tells the readers how she struggled through a New York that no longer exists, but catered to scraping writers and the theater industry in a way that we aren’t familiar with anymore. When the circles of artists were smaller and you didn’t have to already be famous to become somebody.

She takes us with her to London as she watches her cult classic 84, Charing Cross Road become the stuff of legends. And back again to New York where the Broadway version flopped, much to her relief…

Being a celebrity for a week in London had been the most fun I’d ever had in my life, and wonderful for the ego – but only because I’d known I was coming home at the end of it, homem to the quiet, orderly, solitary, unglamorous life I was made for. To be forced to live a celebrity’s life at home, even for a little while, had been a nightmarish possibility. It was gone in the morning, like any other nightmare.

Quotes like this and the 20 or so other,s that I have marked with stickies in the library copy of the book I read, are why I find Hanff such a role model. Her work was not about becoming famous. And it was not about being a wife or mother, nor did she go the route of the beatniks, who were coming up in her era. She was somewhere in between these two extremes of the 1950′s, in a world of her own making that would prove to be ahead of her time. I have to admire this woman who would be in her 90′s today, who led a life that resembled more of a man’s life in that period that did enable women to do so. It is incredibly refreshing to read her work.

Perhaps some of you will feel the same way. If you, like me, wish you could catch  glimpse of the era when being a writer and playwright in New York was more posh than being a hollywood fashionista… you will love the opportunity that Hanff has given us in Q’s Legacy.

Buy this book from Powell’s for as low as $6.50 and Unputdownables gets a commission!

Q’s Legacy
by Helene Hanff