Claire is...

It does seem like this year has been a Grey Garden’ year for me. 

I watched the documentary again and read the book by Lois Wright about her stay there. 

The documentary ‘Grey Gardens’ opens up to us the East Hampton home of Mrs. Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Miss. Edith Bouvier Beale.

Today I watched the film based on the documentary starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.  It was interesting to see beyond the house, which you don’t see in the documentary (except when Little Edie goes to the beach – which from the accounts of Lois Wright she did infrequently because her mother couldn’t be left alone.)  To see a young Big and Little Edie was something that one had imagined before but never truly known or seen.

I feel sorry for the Edies. Their lives could have been so different, less isolated, and more sociable.  Maybe if they had not been so alike, so ‘staunch’ (as Edie says), they could have taken help or advice from those around them.  A little compromise would have gone a long way.

I see hints of my family in them, the untidiness and the ignorance of it in my sister.  The agoraphobic nature of them both in my boyfriend’s nature.  The hoarding of Big Edie reminds me of my love for collecting the detritus of life, the things that most would throw away.  Little Edie’s talk of travel is like my own, I do go places though, just not as often as I’d like.  Oh I can hear her saying that sentence as I write it.

More than anything and maybe just because it is the first thing that you notice in the documentary I am drawn to the say the Beales speak.  They have such a fascinating enunciation of words that a girl from London has never heard before.  It is both poetic and otherworldly and I would have loved to have gone round for tea (or pate and ice cream) and conversed for hours.

Unfortunately Mrs. ‘Big’ Edie Beale and Miss ‘Little’ Edie Beale are no longer with us.

Most famous previously for being the aunt and cousin of Jackie O, I am thankful that their eccentric and interesting characters were captured on film to live on endlessly in the hearts and imagination of everyone who knew or wishes they knew them.