Days and Nights of Bebe Fenstermaker

Synopsis

Richard Gilman describes: “Snyder’s heroine is a young, ambitious, romantic girl just out of college and established in her first tiny apartment in some nameless city. She is writing a novel, but when her savings give out she is forced to get a job, hopefully one which ‘won’t drain her too much’ and which will leave her time for her ‘creative’ work. She of course ends up by working full time and writing in the evenings, but it is generally made clear to her that she really hasn’t much literary ability, so she switches to painting, for which she isn’t terribly endowed either. Eventually, her hopes and aspirations burned away, she comes to an acceptance of her condition, which includes the inability to create a permanent relationship with a man because of her overwhelming need for absolute union…his departure leads her first to a swift decline, represented by beer cans strewn around the untended apartment and an almost total isolation from the world, and then to a kind of resurrection—the beginning of a fragile, undemanding relationship with a stranger…Snyder has also written a counterbalancing element into his drama: On a platform behind the main stage Beebee’s mother and aunts talk about their own lives, the scenes being interspersed with those in which her drama unfolds.”