Three Junes
Contents:
In June of Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses.
Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. From the Trade Paperback edition. Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family.
In June of , Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret sorrows of his marriage. A lovable, slightly repressed gay man, Fenno leads the life of an aloof expatriate in the West Village, running a shop filled with books and birdwatching gear. He believes himself safe from all emotional entanglements—until a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. Each man draws Fenno into territories of the heart he has never braved before, leading him toward an almost unbearable loss that will reveal to him the nature of love.
Three Junes by Julia Glass | BookDragon
This time it is Fenno who meets and captivates Fern, the same woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before. Now pregnant with a son of her own, Fern, like Fenno and Paul before him, must make peace with her past to embrace her future. From the Hardcover edition. Three Junes marks a blessed event for readers of literary fiction everywhere. Glass has written a generous book about family expectations—but also about happiness.
Catches the surprising twists and turns in family relationships, amid love, loss, hope and regret. The traditional novel of social relations is very much alive in Three Junes. Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen, among other exemplars, would surely approve. What led you to create Three Junes? Three Junes grew over several years, like a tree—organically and at first in odd, sporadic bursts—starting out as a short story called "Souvenirs," which was based on an experience I had while traveling in Greece after college.
One of the first stories I wrote as an adult, it was your typical ingenue-abroad, loss-of-innocence tale with a predictably idyllic setting, and I was hoping to sell it to Cosmopolitan magazine, where I was working as a copy editor.
Honorary Thebes
In those days, short stories—some by wonderful writers like Laurie Colwin, Lorrie Moore, and Elinor Lipman—were a fixture of the magazine. Often, there were two in a single issue, just as there once were in the New Yorker. Reportedly, Helen Gurley Brown read my story but thought the heroine too "privileged" for her readers—that is, not your good old "mouseburger" COSMO Girl—so into a drawer it went. Somehow, though, what was now called "Collies" refused to be abandoned, and a couple years later, two things happened: First, I was intrigued by a fiction competition that included a category for "best novella" and decided to amplify the story yet further.
If you want to, you can. Sometimes I wonder if I would ever have written Three Junes without that kick in the pants. But not everyone can write. It does draw extensively, however, on my general experience. Like Fern, I live in the West Village, and I spent a year in Paris on a grant to pursue my work as a painter, but I have never been widowed, the father of my children is nothing like Stavros, and I have certainly never been in a social situation like that weekend Fern spends on Long Island.
My mother is quite proud of her Scottish roots and, through her genealogical research, made contact with relations there; I was sent over at age 17 as a sort of ambassador, and our families have stayed in touch ever since. While the McLeods are in no way based on my overseas cousins, I think that making Paul a Scotsman was an unconscious expression of my respect for family connections and traditions.
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Nothing in life fascinates or moves me more than families; no dramas are more compelling to me than the domestic. The weaving of animals throughout the narrative is also a reflection of my experience, since I was brought up around dogs, horses, cats, and itinerant wildlife. Nor did I escape the influence of animals by moving to New York City; I ended up writing a magazine column on pets my first published writing , and more than 10 years ago I volunteered for an organization that helps people with AIDS take care of their animals often their closest companions. Something that happened to me while doing that work stands like a shadow behind the seminal event at the core of the novel: When I went to interview one man about his dog, he told me he also had a parakeet but had just been told by his doctor that he had to give it up because of risks to his health.
At the time, my sister was a vet up in Boston with a special interest in birds, and she found the parakeet a new home.
When I went to pick the bird up from the owner, he looked significantly weaker than he had just two weeks before. He was in his pajamas, drinking tea from a delicate gilt-edged cup and saucer. As he sat there, looking so unbearably frail, drinking from that elegant cup, I had a heartbreaking glimpse of the life that was slipping away from him. Do you think you always intended to be a writer? Some of my first and sharpest memories are of the look and feel of the arcane, oddly illustrated volumes that filled the shelves in his study. But I also loved to make pictures, and through my school years I remained blithely faithful to both passions.
In high school, I wrote stories, poems, papers, journals, all with intense pleasure—but strangely, I think I began to take my writing ability for granted, perhaps because there were so many other flourishing student writers many of whom are also professional writers today. When I went to college, I found myself more stimulated by my visual arts courses than my courses that involved writing.
I thrived in this men-from-the-boys atmosphere, and in my final year, I was a scholar of the house in art: I had a private studio and worked only on my painting, rather than taking courses. The following year, I was awarded a fellowship to spend a year working on my own in Europe.
Three Junes
Except for letters, writing was no longer a part of my life—and it took several years for me to miss it. In my mid-twenties, like so many other fledgling artists, I moved to New York. For several years I lived alone with a pet rabbit and led a pretty austere life, working as a copy editor by day and painting by night.
Views Read Edit View history. Not really clear to me in this book. One of my favorite characters is a red, blue, and violet Eclectus Parrot named Felicity, who sings scales whenever it rains. The two other Junes, in and , bring the characters around in a kind of spiral, ending with Fern's portion of the story, and a visit to Long Island. Why must all the novels written today be essentially about nothing? I am so glad to meet you!
I read voraciously, as I always have, but my reading began to leave me with a kind of thirst. I realized that I was yearning to compose with words as much as with paint.
The problem was, I knew that having to make a living did not allow me the time to pursue both painting and fiction in a serious way. I decided to give myself over to writing for a while, and though it was a struggle, it felt like coming home. In the years since, I have painted off and on, but what I came to realize is that while I do have visual gifts—which, not incidentally, serve me well as a writer—I am at heart a verbal person, someone whose favorite toys are words.
For me, making art is like speaking a foreign language fluently, but writing, language itself, is my native tongue, the one I know without even knowing how.
Start by marking “Three Junes” as Want to Read: Dare I hope for irony in the NYT Book Review on the back cover of Three Junes? Julia Glass is the author of Three Junes, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, and The Whole World Over. Three Junes is Julia Glass' debut novel. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in Plot summary[edit]. Three Junes follows the McLeods, a Scottish .
He is an old friend with Fern and he develops a tumultuous relationship with Fenno. The novel is written in three parts, using the flashback technique. As Julia Glass has said herself, the book should be viewed not as a trilogy but rather a triptych — elements that may seem small in one section play a large role in another, like a triptych, rather than a consecutive series of novels in a trilogy.
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With acceptance speech by Glass and essay by Judy Blundell from the Awards year anniversary blog. Archived from the original on National Book Award for Fiction — Complete list — — — Retrieved from " https: Pages to import images to Wikidata All stub articles. Views Read Edit View history.
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