Read Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun for Free Online

print and good riddance to all but Bill M.’s jacket art, whose affection for his Anzio Bobbsey twin glows painfully through my memories of the light-hearted hour I spent posing. Yet my silly first book did stay on the NYT ’s bestseller list long enough to play ships in the night, Pam sinking to starboard as curly-haired Norman scrambled up portside, with The Naked and the Dead .
    With pride that’s lasted to this day, Pamela Buchanan could’ve kissed every one of the enthusiasts for our nation’s birth pangs who bought Glory Be when it came out the year said nation was deciding for the second time whether it liked Ike or needed Adlai badly. One of the Paris footlocker’s prizes is a laminated telegram— i’m just glad you aren’t a politician best wishes jack kennedy —I got the week my sloop skimmed past his ghost-skippered PT boat in sales.
    Intermittence may be my byline’s cross to bear. That’s not the same as discontinuity. My last foray into print was an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times dated 6/6/2004 in the clippings file and begging the ninnies who run the show out there to spare the Ambassador Hotel from the wrecker’s ball. You can see how they listened, too. It still meant something to me that the Pamela Buchanan who signed that piece could nod across a span of seventy years at Pamela Buchanan, the fourteen-year-old authoress—a term she then thought divine—of “ Chanson d’automne .”
    My first and only stab at verse, which politely reached for a cotton swab and moved on, its wretched dozen lines were printed in the Fall 1934 edition of Pink Rosebuds , the literary magazine of Purcey’s Girls Academy of St. Paul.From its title on, to call the thing derivative would be an insult to plagiarists everywhere. Its one acute bit was a game of peekaboo with nonperpendicular pronouns, silly but not bad for a teenager.
    Inanity wasn’t the reason “ Chanson d’automne ” shattered my brief spell as a poetess, an even yummier-sounding word to my young ears. Winning me Professor Hormel’s writhing plaudits along with my classmates’ far more decisive mockery, my poemess was written in French.
    Back then, I couldn’t see what I’d done wrong. Collected by my new American guardian when the Paris docked in New York, I’d only recently been shipped back to my perplexing homeland. My mother’s Belgian second husband had advertised his reluctance to see more than the back of la petite Pamelle in the wake of his Day- zee ’s surprise exit from the breathing business.
    On a more practical, Brussels-sprouting sort of note, Georges Flagon didn’t care to keep paying my tuition at Mme Chignonne’s. c’est la vie , his cable sighed, and I doubt Tim Cadwaller realized the real pang of the name he’d picked out for my website. I never felt more like Daisy’s daughter than in the first few months after she’d left me as the only surviving Fay or Buchanan on the face of the globe.
    Used as I was to her ways by then, I couldn’t help thinking she’d carried negligence a bullet too far. Hello, mother mine.
    Posted by: Pammie
    In my younger, less invulnerable years, I often wished my guardian hadn’t told me what Daisy was alleged by no less an authority than herself to have wished for me at birth. He had so few even fugitively Pamcentric anecdotes in stock that I can’t blame him for sharing that one when I kept whinging, and she didn’t get her stupid wish. Or, depending on how you count, her fairy-tale three wishes.
    No, Mother: your daughter never did get to be beautiful. Nor even stay so little once I shot up to a hoop-hunting five foot ten in the Midwest the year after you died. And I wasn’t a fool. I made my way.
    Early on, I learned or relearned how to be American, a skill you couldn’t have imagined was one. By the age of twenty-one, I was doing something you never did: earn my living. And as a writer too, just what I once heard you bragging to the Lotus Eater in Provincetown you’d