| My Little Blue Dress | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Bruno Maddox |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Literary fiction |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
| Publication date | 2001 |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 978-0-670-88483-4 |
| OCLC Number | 44592794 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.6 21 |
| LC Classification | PS3563.A339444 M34 2001 |
In 1999, Maddox sold the advance rights to his first novel, My Little Blue Dress, to a German publisher based on a five-page fax proposal he sent on the advice of his literary agent John Brockman. Within a week Brockman managed to sell the rights to the novel to publishers in an additional eight countries on the strength of the proposal alone. (Maddox had not yet written even an initial manuscript.)
| “ | It was a pretty terrifying experience, suddenly having a legal obligation to write an extremely difficult post-modern novel having never written anything before and also, stupidly, I told him I could do it in six months, which was just a conversational thing until it turned up in black and white in my contract. The six months came and went and my reputation in publishing at the moment is a reflection of the two and a half years I spent writing it longer than I should have done. The Dutch cancelled when the Millennium came and went, they decided it was a millennial book, but weirdly they would have accepted it in November of 1999, for a few days of millennial reading, they failed to see that it is obviously a twenty-first century book. | ” |
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—Bruno Maddox, on the publishing of his first novel. |
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My Little Blue Dress was published in 2001 by Viking Press, a Penguin Group imprint. The novel begins as a memoir of a hundred-year-old woman, but several chapters later reveals itself to be a spoof of the genre. The protagonist is a fictional Bruno Maddox who is desperately attempting to create a forgery of an old woman's memoir in a single night. Several book reviewers avoided spoiling the novel's satire but others gave away its premise, reasoning that the publisher "reveal all on the book jacket anyway". The novel's intrigue lies in the mysterious reason compelling the fictional Maddox to forge a memoir.
Critics applauded My Little Blue Dress but also expressed some reservations. For example, Salon.com's Maria Russo cautioned that the novel "is one of those 'don't try this at home' literary experiments that could easily have turned into an unreadable, pretentious disaster", but concluded that Maddox "pulls it off with a kind of fearless pizzazz". The New York Times' Emily Barton conceded that "for all its blunders", Maddox delivers "a winsome and vastly entertaining novel".
In an interview, Maddox praised Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, stating that he drew inspiration from protagonist Patrick Bateman's long-winded monologues about Phil Collins, restaurants, clothes, and how to remove blood from his carpets.
In 2001, Maddox promoted his first novel on a joint book tour billed as the "Minor Novelists Tour" with his friend William Monahan, another former Spy editor, but it was interrupted by the 9/11 attacks. Monahan's Light House: A Trifle was also published by a Penguin imprint. Several years later, Maddox gave some indication that he was working on a film adaptation of My Little Blue Dress, but it is unknown whether Maddox completed the script.
Read more about this topic: Bruno Maddox
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