Дуглас Коупленд (Douglas Coupland)DON'T WORRY, MOTHER...IF THE MARRIAGE DOESN'T WORK OUT, WE CAN
ALWAYS GET
DIVORCED
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS NEW YORK
GENERATION X
TALES FOR AN ACCELERATED CULTURE
DOUGLAS COUPLAND
"Her hair was totally 1950s Indiana Woolworth perfume clerk. You know—sweet but dumb —she'll marry her way out of the trailer park some day soon. But the dress was early '60s Aeroflot stewardess—you know—that really sad blue the Russians used before they all started wanting to buy Sonys and having Guy Laroche design their Politburo caps. And such make-up! Perfect '70s Mary Quant, with these little PVC floral applique earrings that looked like antiskid bathtub stickers from a gay Hollywood tub circa 1956. She really caught the sadness—she was the hippest person there. Totally."
TRACEY,27
"They're my children. Adults or not, I just can't kick them out of the house. It would be cruel. And besides—they're great cooks."
HELEN, 52
PART ONE THE SUN I S
YOUR
ENEMY
Back in the late 1970s, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Bran don, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of the sun. I must have made a strange sight at my young age, being pencil thin and practically albino, quietly checking into a TraveLodge motel to spend the night alone, happily watching snowy network television offerings and drinking glasses of water from glass tumblers that had been washed and rewrapped in times they looked like ered. But the night soon morning of the eclipse, I took civic bus transportaThere, I walked far down a farmer's field — some paper sheaths so many they had been sandpap ended, and come the eschewed tour buses and tion to the edge of town. a dirt side road and into sort of cereal that was