cover image Whatever Happened to Jacy Farrow?

Whatever Happened to Jacy Farrow?

Ceil Cleveland. University of North Texas Press, $26.5 (321pp) ISBN 978-1-57441-030-3

Will the real Jacy Farrow please stand up? Cleveland and Larry McMurtry grew up together in the little Texas town of Archer City, fictionalized as Thalia in McMurtry's 1966 novel, The Last Picture Show. Peter Bogdanovich's risque 1970 film version (and its 1989 sequel, Texasville) created an interesting dilemma for Cleveland. Long rumored by the locals to be the role model for the racy, bitchy blonde teenager Jacy Farrow, played in the film by a 19-year-old, Lolita-like Cybil Shepherd, Cleveland is simultaneously shocked at being so identified (""I wouldn't think of behaving as she did"") and curious about what went on beneath Jacy's cool, blank facade. Cleveland, a fifth-generation Texan now living on Long Island, thus sets out to explore her own experience of growing up a smart, pretty girl in dusty, provincial small-town Texas. Her descriptions of 1950s male-driven cultural norms, untimely marriage and child-bearing, an eventual difficult return to school and her nurturing of a nascent feminism, are evocative, if perhaps overly familiar. Eventually coming full circle to give the commencement address at her old high school, ""Jacy,"" now vice president for university affairs at SUNY Stony Brook, can look back with pride on the women who shaped her life, and perhaps shape a few lives in setting the record straight. (Nov.)