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Jell-O Girls: A Family History
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Jell-O Girls: A Family History Hardcover -

by Allie Rowbottom


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A "gorgeous" (New York Times) memoir that braids the evolution of one of America's most iconic branding campaigns with the stirring tales of the women who lived behind its facade - told by the inheritor of their stories. In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege - but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments. More than 100 years after that deal was struck, Allie's mother Mary was diagnosed with the same incurable cancer, a disease that had also claimed her own mother's life. Determined to combat what she had come to consider the "Jell-O curse" and her looming mortality, Mary began obsessively researching her family's past, determined to understand the origins of her illness and the impact on her life of Jell-O and the traditional American values the company championed. Before she died in 2015, Mary began to send Allie boxes of her research and notes, in the hope that her daughter might write what she could not. Jell-O Girls is the liberation of that story. A gripping examination of the dark side of an iconic American product and a moving portrait of the women who lived in the shadow of its fractured fortune, Jell-O Girls is a family history, a feminist history, and a story of motherhood, love and loss. In crystalline prose Rowbottom considers the roots of trauma not only in her own family, but in the American psyche as well, ultimately weaving a story that is deeply personal, as well as deeply connected to the collective female experience.

Details

  • Title Jell-O Girls: A Family History
  • Author Allie Rowbottom
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Pages 288
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Little Brown and Company
  • ISBN 9780316510615 / 0316510610
  • Weight 1.08 lbs (0.49 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.63 x 6.38 x 1.13 in (24.46 x 16.21 x 2.87 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Mothers and daughters - United States, Food industry and trade - United States
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2017946215
  • Dewey Decimal Code 338.476

About the author

Allie Rowbottom received her BA from New York University, her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. Her work has received scholarships, essay prizes and honorable mentions from Tin House, Inprint, the Best American Essays series, the Florida Review, The Bellingham Review, the Black Warrior Review, The Southampton Review, and Hunger Mountain. She lives in Los Angeles.
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JELL-O Girls: A Family History
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JELL-O Girls: A Family History

by Rowbottom, Allie

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by Rowbottom, Allie

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Jell-O Girls: A Family History
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Jell-O Girls: A Family History

by Allie Rowbottom

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9780316510615
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JELL-O Girls : A Family History
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JELL-O Girls : A Family History

by Rowbottom, Allie

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ISBN 13
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ISBN 10
0316510610
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