Fairly Smooth Operator: Not your Grandmother’s Coming of Age Story…Or is it?

Caroline is the author of Fairly Smooth Operator now available on Amazon. She is PhD student and CIA and Coast Guard veteran.

What is this book….Is it a tell all? A memoir? Short stories? A mess? A message? Entertainment? A mistake? No big deal?

What is it and how you know will depend on when and how you were raised and the influence of the current climate on your perspective.

Right now, we seem to be in an era of oversharing. Oversharing our thoughts on Twitter, our bodies on Instagram, and perhaps, our experiences in books. As much as I am proud to not be a fit former military woman using her butt cheeks to gain followers, maybe I am not immune from the zeitgeist of sharing intimacies with the greater population.

What would my grandmother say?

It might be easy to think she would disapprove of the lack of modesty, however, I can say that her generation might be proud of the sustained progress that let me live my life enough to have the freedom to reflect on it and publish a book about it.

As their boyfriends and husbands left for WWII, my grandmother’s generation felt the breeze of freedom to develop into women with independence and their own thoughts. Although I’ll never know the details of her experience, my grandmother, in particular, developed her opinions, particularly on fashion. She loved a good sale and had a killer sense of style. She was gorgeous and her sensuality showed in her wedding photos that were scattered in white frames around the living room. Her freedom was not fully lived though. I doubt that she was able to sustain that sense of freedom through four children and her husband’s job taking the lead from the 1950’s and onward. Perhaps she gained some freedom back when he left and what she shared with me were the remnants of her brush with being her own person.

My grandmother spoke of the letters she received from various men while they were off on their military service. Whether true or part of her created fantasy to pass on, she giggled her famous dating advice to me as, “try, try, try before you buy.”

My grandmother’s modesty doesn’t seem to be the problem. I don’t think it’s her generation that develops uneasy feelings with my stories. I think, maybe, it’s a generation or two younger than her who never had that breeze of freedom a woman feels when the pressure of traditional paths is lifted, even temporarily. Perhaps the generation uneasy with my stories are the ones that had to try five times harder to be approved for a job and couldn’t get away with any type of potential discredit to their reputation. These different generations, not having certain freedoms, might be slightly concerned that a woman like me has this kind of story to tell, let alone the ability and audience to tell it in a full book.

With full understanding that our own journey will influence our interpretation of others’, what I’m really saying is my book is fine and it’s mild in this era of oversharing. Moreover, if my grandmother had grown up in these times, she would definitely be an influencer.

This may not be my grandmother’s story, but maybe she wishes it was.