Marriage is no happily-ever-after conclusion-it’s a prison that the prisoner has to pretend to enjoy. They drink to excess Sarah is isolated, her occasional attempts at writing going nowhere Tony beats her. But after this brief high point, the relationship goes precipitously downhill: Tony and Sarah have three children and descend into dysfunctional family life. At the start of their courtship, he and Sarah dress up in their finest clothes, walk in the Easter Parade, and are photographed for the rotogravure section of the New York Times. Things look promising when Sarah meets a handsome, genteel neighbor, Tony Wilson. The three women form an awkward triad, often struggling to find anything to talk about, yet forever implicated in each other’s lives. Their father, who lives in New York City, is well-intentioned but distant, a copy-man at a newspaper who didn’t amount to much and knows it. Emily and Sarah Grimes grow up with their alcoholic, self-deluding mother, Pookie, in a series of rental homes they can’t afford. I fell in love with it from the dark, once-upon-a-time cadence of its opening sentence: “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.” If this is a woman’s book, Yates is clear that it won’t be a light-hearted one. The Easter Parade, by contrast, has sold just over 10,000 copies in paperback since 2004. In the decades since his death in 1992, Revolutionary Road has kept Yates’s reputation alive according to NPD BookScan, it has sold 483,000 copies in paperback since 2004, with over half of that coming after the release of the film version in 2008. Like most people, the only Yates I’d read was Revolutionary Road. I was working on my new “woman’s book,” Dual Citizens, about two sisters and their complicated, life-long bond, when a friend suggested I read The Easter Parade.

Is it a book that features women? Is it anything I write, because I’m a woman?

Even today, women’s fiction remains a category in publishing-my own books are sometimes labeled that way-and I often wonder what it means. Yates was not the first or last male novelist ( see under: Franzen) to worry that his work would be diminished by its association with women. But he also called up his editor Sam Lawrence to express his worry that Delacorte planned to market the novel, which follows two sisters from the 1930s to the 1970s, as a “woman’s book.” Yates-who’d achieved career-making acclaim with his first novel, Revolutionary Road, but less success with subsequent ones-was excited about his expanded readership. When Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade came out in 1976, it was a Book of the Month Club selection, alongside Judith Guest’s Ordinary People.

The easter parade by richard yates