Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel
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| Author(s) | Rebecca Wells |
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| Subtitle | A Novel |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
| Honors | |
| When Vivi and Siddalee Walker, an unforgettable mother-daughter team, get into a savage fight over a New York Times article that refers to Vivi as a “tap-dancing child abuser,” the fallout is felt from Louisiana to New York to Seattle. Siddalee, a successful theater director with a huge hit on her hands, panics and postpones her upcoming wedding to her lover and friend, Connor McGill. Vivi’s intrepid gang of lifelong girlfriends, the Ya-Yas, sashay in and conspire to bring everyone back together. In 1932, Vivi and the Ya-Yas were disqualified from a… | |
When Vivi and Siddalee Walker, an unforgettable mother-daughter team, get into a savage fight over a New York Times article that refers to Vivi as a “tap-dancing child abuser,” the fallout is felt from Louisiana to New York to Seattle. Siddalee, a successful theater director with a huge hit on her hands, panics and postpones her upcoming wedding to her lover and friend, Connor McGill. Vivi’s intrepid gang of lifelong girlfriends, the Ya-Yas, sashay in and conspire to bring everyone back together.
In 1932, Vivi and the Ya-Yas were disqualified from a Shirley Temple Look-Alike Contest for unladylike behavior. Sixty years later, they’re “bucking seventy” and still making waves. They persuade Vivi to send Sidda a scrapbook of girlhood mementos titled “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.”
With the scrapbook in hand, Sidda retreats to a cabin on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, tormented by fear and uncertainty about the future, and intent on discovering the key to the tangle of anger and tenderness she feels toward her mother. But Vivi’s album reveals more questions than answers and leads Sidda to encounter the legacy of imperfect love and the unknowable mystery of life.
With passion and a rare gift for language, Rebecca Wells moves from present to past, unraveling Vivi’s life, her enduring friendships with the Ya-Yas and the reverberations of Siddalee. The collective power of the Ya-Yas, each of them totally individual and authentic, permeates this story of a tribe of Louisiana wild women who are impossible to tame.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood calls to mind The Joy Luck Club in its exploration of the relationships between mothers and daughters; in its unearthing of family secrets, it evokes The Prince of Tides. Ultimately, in its aching longing, in its deep humor, in its heartbreaking fun and in its joy and forgiveness, Rebecca Wells has created a big, original, incandescent novel whose Louisiana landscape and indelible characters radiate with grace, wit and love.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Wells is a Louisiana-born Seattle actress and playwright; her loopy saga of a 40-year-old player in Seattle’s hot theater scene who must come to terms with her mama’s past in steamy Thornton City, Louisiana, reads like a lengthy episode of Designing Women written under the influence of mint juleps and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. The Ya-Yas are the wild circle of girls who swirl around the narrator Siddalee’s mama, Vivi, whose vivid voice is “part Scarlett, part Katharine Hepburn, part Tallulah.” The Ya-Yas broke the no-booze rule at the cotillion, skinny-dipped their way to jail in the town water tower, disrupted the Shirley Temple look-alike contest, and bonded for life because, as one says, “It’s so much fun being a bad girl!”
Siddalee must repair her busted relationship with Vivi by reading a half-century’s worth of letters and clippings contained in the Ya-Ya Sisterhood’s packet of “Divine Secrets.” It’s a contrived premise, but the secrets are really fun to learn.
Barnes and Noble
A powerfully literate yet thoroughly engaging and accessible novel, this story of a close-knit society of southern women has become a modern cult classic bolstered by author Rebecca Wells’s abiltity to transcend standard-issue chick lit with bold and unique characters and a tale that digs deeply into the complex bonds of family.
The entangled story of actress Siddalee Walker, her mother Vivi, and Vivi’s group of pals—the Ya-Yas—gets off to a heated start when Sidda’s disparaging remarks about her mother run in the New York Times. Vivi declares all-out war and immediately cuts Sidda out of her will, pushes a libel suit, and forbids the other septuagenarian Ya-Ya’s to speak to Sidda ever again. Convinced she doesn’t “know how to love,” a shaken Sidda postpones her upcoming wedding and flees to a remote Washington cabin. Suddenly concerned about her daughter, Vivi convenes an emergency Ya-Ya council and at last decides to reveal her jealously guarded past to Sidda through her treasured scrapbook, “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.”
The scrapbook spans Ya-Ya history, documenting among other things the hilarious Shirley Temple Look-Alike Contest that first united the four women in a conspiracy against polite society; the secret history and initiation rites of the group; a trip to Atlanta to attend the premier of Gone With The Wind; and Vivi’s first and greatest love. It also sheds light on Vivi’s reaction to the constraints of motherhood and the alcoholism, self-medication, and spiritual confusion that eventually led to a complete nervous breakdown. Also buried in the book is the key that unlocks Sidda’s childhood memory of a lost lesson of love and brings her to a new understanding of her family’s shared triumphs and tragedies.
Much more universal in its appeal than the “women’s book” some reviewers have been tempted to call it (according to Wells, “It’s a book for women—and smart men”), The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood manages with passion, humor, and an irrepressible gift for language to somehow show readers of all backgrounds a mirror-perfect reflection of their own life experiences. (Greg Marrs)
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