Alison Lurie

The Last Resort

Making up stories was the supreme joy of Alison Lurie’s young life. Growing up in White Plains, New York, Lurie felt her disadvantages acutely. A birth injury damaged her hearing and left her with facial paralysis, making her mouth turn downward on one side. Neither athletic nor eager to please, she felt convinced she would never be a wife or mother, so she set out to do great literary work. Lurie found inspiration in the iconoclastic heroines of The Wizard of Oz and the Nancy Drew series, and has returned to children’s literature throughout her career.

From The Last Resort:

“…as you grow older and the future shrinks, you have only two choices: you can live in the fading past, or, like children do, in the bright full present.”

After graduating from Radcliffe in 1947, she married Jonathan Peale Bishop, a Harvard grad student. They settled first in Amherst, then near Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, for his teaching assignment. Eventually Lurie joined the Cornell faculty and remained there for over three decades. In 1961, she’d published a few poems and short stories but, feeling exhausted by her literary and parenting efforts, she decided to give up writing. The resulting boredom drove her to write a novel simply for fun. Her third novel, Love and Friendship, was published in 1962.

Lurie’s most celebrated works, such as The War Between the Tates, a comedy of manners depicting a disintegrating marriage during the Vietnam War, take place in the world of academia. Her first marriage ended in 1985. Ten years later she married Edward Hower and now divides her time between Ithaca, New York, London, and Key West, Florida. She has three sons.

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Foreign Affairs. Virginia Miner, a fifty-something unmarried professor living in London to work on her new book about children’s folk rhymes, is drawn into an affair with an Oklahoman tourist. A poignant, witty winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Key West Tequila Sunrise

The Last Resort is set in Key West, known for its Tequila Sunrises.

2 oz. tequila

Orange juice

2 dashes grenadine syrup

Slice of blood orange

Ice

Pour tequila in a highball glass with ice, and top with orange juice. Stir. Add grenadine by tilting glass and pouring grenadine down the side by flipping the bottle vertically very quickly. The grenadine should go straight to the bottom and then rise up slowly through the drink. Garnish with a slice of blood orange. Serves 1.