Confessions of a Parodist

[April 20th, 2005] Chelsea Cain is the kind of person people move to Portland hoping to become. As Calendar Girl, she writes a weekly humor column for The Oregonian, ruminating over such disparate topics as comic books and the joy of the Portland rain. She and her film-reviewer husband, Marc Mohan, co-own Video Vérité, a DVD rental shop in the "It" Mississippi neighborhood, and the 33-year-old is assembling a publishing record people twice her age might envy.

Making respectful use of her childhood (and childhood obsessions), she has written two books, edited another, and just had her third book released: Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, a full-scale parody of the famed Nancy Drew series in which Cain reinvents the titian-haired teen detective with whom four generations of girls have grown up.

If her 1996 memoir, Dharma Girl, was her process-oriented, early-20s effort at coming to terms with her countercultural parents and the effect their social rebellion had on her own evolution, her two most recent books, last year's The Hippie Handbook and Sleuth, are evidence of a generous perspective on the past. Both books manage to make fun with, rather than of, their respective targets, calling out both their ridiculous and sublime aspects.

The Nancy Drew mystery series, which began in 1930 and was written by a syndicate of ghost authors who all huddled under the umbrella of "Carolyn Keene," still serves as many girls' gateway drug to serious reading. Nancy herself, an adventurous, clever and-just as important-slim young woman, is doted upon by her widowed father and devoted to the service of all that is good, just and proper. She's also an annoyingly perfect student, daughter and citizen, with a model's looks and the demeanor of a first lady.

Concentrating on the most popular period in the series' long life, '50s-era Nancy Drew, Cain's parody grants her girl detective a first-person voice, an interest in sex, and the ability to age (over the course of 350-plus novels, the sleuth manages only to make it from 16 to 18-here, we see her slender waist expand and her tresses gray). The Nancy revealed in Cain's pages has all the passion for detective work of the original-but she also has a passion for Frank Hardy, the analytical elder of her teen-sleuth counterparts, the Hardy boys.

Cain fulfills the premise of her homage to young-adult genre fiction with a well-versed familiarity with its conventions, as well as a keen ear for idiom that takes the reader right back to River Heights, Nancy's old stomping ground. Villains retort, police officers speak admiringly, and anything odd is noted as just a bit queer. (Also queer in this parody is Nancy's friend George, "who loved her boyish name," but we suspected that all along.)

"I think it's easy to relate to Nancy because of her blankness," Cain told WW. "My Nancy Drew was a very different one than the girl in the books-when I daydreamed about her, she was more alive. That I, a hippie kid on a commune, could relate to this upper-class girl, living in a reality that couldn't be more different than my own, is a testament to the series' genius."

Cain's Nancy will strike a chord with the generations of women who remember the day when their mothers led them to an entire bookshop wall of yellow spines, where they discovered that the coolest thing you could grow up to be was a teen detective. Oh, to be one of those meddling kids, without whom the villains would have gotten away with everything! Confessions of a Parodist

Chelsea Cain appears at a free reading 3 pm Sunday, April 24, on the Powell's Stage of the Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., as part of the Wordstock Festival. For more this week's Wordstock events, see www.wordstockfestival.com.Chelsea Cain is the kind of person people move to Portland hoping to become. As Calendar Girl, she writes a weekly humor column for The Oregonian in which she gets paid to ruminate over such disparate topics as comic books and the joy of the Portland rain. She and her film-reviewer husband, Marc Mohan, co-own Video Vérité, a hip DVD rental shop in the "It" Mississippi neighborhood, and the 33-year-old is assembling the kind of publishing record that people twice her age might envy.

Making respectful use of her childhood (and childhood obsessions), she has authored two books, edited another, and just had her third book released: Confessions of a Teen Sleuth. Sleuth is a full-scale parody of the famed Nancy Drew series in which Cain reinvents the titian-haired teen detective whith whom four generations of girls have grown up.

If her 1996 memoir, Dharma Girl, was her process-oriented, early-20s effort at coming to terms with her countercultural parents and the effect their social rebellion had on her own evolution, her two most recent books, Sleuth and last year's The Hippie Handbook, are evidence of a generous perspective on the past that has come with time. Both books manage to make fun with, rather than of, their respective targets, calling out both their ridiculous and sublime aspects.

The Nancy Drew mystery series, which began in 1930 and was written by a syndicate of ghost authors who all huddled under the umbrella of "Carolyn Keene," still serves as many girls' gateway drug to serious reading. Nancy herself, an adventurous, clever and-just as importantly-slim young woman, is doted upon by her widowed father and devoted to the service of all that is good, just and proper. She's also an annoyingly perfect student, daughter and citizen, with a model's looks and the demeanor of a first lady.

Concentrating on the most popular period in the series' long life, '50s-era Nancy Drew, Cain's parody grants Nancy a first-person voice, an interest in sex, and the ability to age (over the course of the 350-plus Nancy Drew novels, the sleuth manages only to make it from 16 to 18-here, we see her slender waist expand and her tresses gray). The Nancy revealed in Cain's pages has all the passion for detective work of the original-but she also has a passion for Frank Hardy, the analytical elder of her teen-sleuth counterparts, the Hardy boys.

Cain fulfills the premise of her homage to young-adult genre fiction with a well-versed familiarity with its conventions, as well as a keen ear for idiom that takes the reader right back to River Heights, Nancy's old stomping ground. Villains retort, police officers speak admiringly, and anything odd is noted as just a bit queer. (Also queer in this parody is Nancy's friend George, "who loved her boyish name," but we suspected that all along.)

"I think it's easy to relate to Nancy because of her blankness," Cain told WW. "My Nancy Drew was a very different one than the girl in the books-when I daydreamed about her, she was more alive. That I, a hippie kid on a commune, could relate to this upper-class girl, living in a reality that couldn't be more different than my own, is a testament to the series' genius."

Cain's Nancy will strike a chord with the generations of women who remember the day when their mothers led them to an entire bookshop wall of yellow spines, where they Chelsea Cain is the kind of person people move to Portland hoping to become. As Calendar Girl, she writes a weekly humor column for The Oregonian in which she gets paid to ruminate over such disparate topics as comic books and the joy of the Portland rain. She and her film-reviewer husband, Marc Mohan, co-own Video Vérité, a hip DVD rental shop in the "It" Mississippi neighborhood, and the 33-year-old is assembling the kind of publishing record that people twice her age might envy.

Making respectful use of her childhood (and childhood obsessions), she has authored two books, edited another, and just had her third book released: Confessions of a Teen Sleuth. Sleuth is a full-scale parody of the famed Nancy Drew series in which Cain reinvents the titian-haired teen detective whith whom four generations of girls have grown up.

If her 1996 memoir, Dharma Girl, was her process-oriented, early-20s effort at coming to terms with her countercultural parents and the effect their social rebellion had on her own evolution, her two most recent books, Sleuth and last year's The Hippie Handbook, are evidence of a generous perspective on the past that has come with time. Both books manage to make fun with, rather than of, their respective targets, calling out both their ridiculous and sublime aspects.

The Nancy Drew mystery series, which began in 1930 and was written by a syndicate of ghost authors who all huddled under the umbrella of "Carolyn Keene," still serves as many girls' gateway drug to serious reading. Nancy herself, an adventurous, clever and-just as importantly-slim young woman, is doted upon by her widowed father and devoted to the service of all that is good, just and proper. She's also an annoyingly perfect student, daughter and citizen, with a model's looks and the demeanor of a first lady.

Concentrating on the most popular period in the series' long life, '50s-era Nancy Drew, Cain's parody grants Nancy a first-person voice, an interest in sex, and the ability to age (over the course of the 350-plus Nancy Drew novels, the sleuth manages only to make it from 16 to 18-here, we see her slender waist expand and her tresses gray). The Nancy revealed in Cain's pages has all the passion for detective work of the original-but she also has a passion for Frank Hardy, the analytical elder of her teen-sleuth counterparts, the Hardy boys.

Cain fulfills the premise of her homage to young-adult genre fiction with a well-versed familiarity with its conventions, as well as a keen ear for idiom that takes the reader right back to River Heights, Nancy's old stomping ground. Villains retort, police officers speak admiringly, and anything odd is noted as just a bit queer. (Also queer in this parody is Nancy's friend George, "who loved her boyish name," but we suspected that all along.)

"I think it's easy to relate to Nancy because of her blankness," Cain told WW. "My Nancy Drew was a very different one than the girl in the books-when I daydreamed about her, she was more alive. That I, a hippie kid on a commune, could relate to this upper-class girl, living in a reality that couldn't be more different than my own, is a testament to the series' genius."

Cain's Nancy will strike a chord with the generations of women who remember the day when their mothers led them to an entire bookshop wall of yellow spines, where they discovered that the coolest thing you could grow up to be was a teen detective. Oh, to be one of those meddling kids, without whom the villains would have gotten away with everything!

Chelsea Cain is the kind of person people move to Portland hoping to become. As Calendar Girl, she writes a weekly humor column for The Oregonian in which she gets paid to ruminate over such disparate topics as comic books and the joy of the Portland rain. She and her film-reviewer husband, Marc Mohan, co-own Video Vérité, a hip DVD rental shop in the "It" Mississippi neighborhood, and the 33-year-old is assembling the kind of publishing record that people twice her age might envy.

Making respectful use of her childhood (and childhood obsessions), she has authored two books, edited another, and just had her third book released: Confessions of a Teen Sleuth. Sleuth is a full-scale parody of the famed Nancy Drew series in which Cain reinvents the titian-haired teen detective whith whom four generations of girls have grown up.

If her 1996 memoir, Dharma Girl, was her process-oriented, early-20s effort at coming to terms with her countercultural parents and the effect their social rebellion had on her own evolution, her two most recent books, Sleuth and last year's The Hippie Handbook, are evidence of a generous perspective on the past that has come with time. Both books manage to make fun with, rather than of, their respective targets, calling out both their ridiculous and sublime aspects.

The Nancy Drew mystery series, which began in 1930 and was written by a syndicate of ghost authors who all huddled under the umbrella of "Carolyn Keene," still serves as many girls' gateway drug to serious reading. Nancy herself, an adventurous, clever and-just as importantly-slim young woman, is doted upon by her widowed father and devoted to the service of all that is good, just and proper. She's also an annoyingly perfect student, daughter and citizen, with a model's looks and the demeanor of a first lady.

Concentrating on the most popular period in the series' long life, '50s-era Nancy Drew, Cain's parody grants Nancy a first-person voice, an interest in sex, and the ability to age (over the course of the 350-plus Nancy Drew novels, the sleuth manages only to make it from 16 to 18-here, we see her slender waist expand and her tresses gray). The Nancy revealed in Cain's pages has all the passion for detective work of the original-but she also has a passion for Frank Hardy, the analytical elder of her teen-sleuth counterparts, the Hardy boys.

Cain fulfills the premise of her homage to young-adult genre fiction with a well-versed familiarity with its conventions, as well as a keen ear for idiom that takes the reader right back to River Heights, Nancy's old stomping ground. Villains retort, police officers speak admiringly, and anything odd is noted as just a bit queer. (Also queer in this parody is Nancy's friend George, "who loved her boyish name," but we suspected that all along.)

"I think it's easy to relate to Nancy because of her blankness," Cain told WW. "My Nancy Drew was a very different one than the girl in the books-when I daydreamed about her, she was more alive. That I, a hippie kid on a commune, could relate to this upper-class girl, living in a reality that couldn't be more different than my own, is a testament to the series' genius."

Cain's Nancy will strike a chord with the generations of women who remember the day when their mothers led them to an entire bookshop wall of yellow spines, where they discovered that the coolest thing you could grow up to be was a teen detective. Oh, to be one of those meddling kids, without whom the villains would have gotten away with everything!