My First Thirty Years
Publication: [Dallas]: Book Club of Texas, 1989. First American Edition.
Notes: Afterword by Larry McMurtry; woodblock illustrations by Claire Van Vliet. Published in an edition of 500 copies, designed by Van Vliet in the style of a 1920s Paris book.
This is a little-known memoir of a woman who grew up in Abilene and worked her way to Europe, where this book was published in Paris, by Contact Editions, in 1925. Contact Editions also published Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. The Book Club of Texas was encouraged to reprint the book by McMurtry, who had a copy of the original in his private collection.
The original edition is quite scarce, as many copies were confiscated by customs in the US and Great Britain, on obscenity grounds. The opening sentence is as brutal as any in literature: "Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the pre-natal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied..." Part of the reason she despised her family is that all of her older brothers took turns raping or trying to rape her, starting when she was four.
She continues, "Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously cruel, Christ-like, and handsome man with an animal’s appetite for begetting children."
Spurred by this new edition, scholars began looking into what happened to Beasley, who disappeared in 1927. It turns out, according to the obituary published by the New York Times in 2018, that Beasley was deported from England where she had been living, and upon arriving in the US was committed to a mental institution, where she lived until she died in 1955 of cancer.
McMurtry encouraged the Book Club of Texas to print this, the first American edition of the book. Van Vliet, the artist behind the acclaimed Janus Press, prepared the woodblock illustrations, which were printed from the original blocks. Her book design left the pages unopened and there is an instruction sheet laid in for how to safely cut open the pages during reading.
241 pages.
Edition + Condition: First American edition, first printing. Near fine in wrappers (paper covers).
Item No: #363744
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