The Flight of Alice Blue Gown-A Novel — Roger K. Miller

Alice Farrowman, a smart and pretty high school girl in the late 1950s, cannot seem to shake a psychopathic boyfriend who emotionally and physically abuses her. Unassertive and indecisive, but desperate to escape him, she takes the foolish, fateful step of quitting school in her senior year to marry another young man she has known only two months-and goes from frying pan to frying pan. Virgil, her husband, though not physically abusive, is an emotional midget who constantly ridicules and belittles Alice, who bears him three children in five years. A feckless, clueless, and mostly jobless ne'er-do-well, he has learned his domineering ways from his Gorgon of a mother, Opal, to whose apron strings he is securely tied. Between them, Virgil and Opal make a continual hell of Alice's life, which consists almost entirely of work (sometimes at two jobs). Afraid to rebel because of threats that they will take her children, she slogs on in her ever-deepening rut of misery. When Virgil one January comes up with a scheme that, like all of his ideas, is sure to fail and thus impoverish them even further, Alice begins to feel that she simply cannot bear it all anymore. But then she finds a way to end her misery. The Flight of Alice Blue Gown is an emotionally wrenching novel of a good woman's life stretched to its limits-and snapping in a most surprising way.