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Wynelda-Ann Shelton

Girl's Poker Night

You gotta love a book that begins "Happy endings aren't for cowards," then proceeds to show us exactly how cowardly the narrator is when it comes to putting herself on the line. Ruby Capote, the heroine of Girl's Poker Night, is a columnist who details the life of the single girl (herself), while keeping her deepest self out of the column.

The format of GPN tells us almost as much about Ruby as do her words themselves. At first, I thought the format of the book was a gimmick, a trick of the trade. It does not have traditional chapters and doesn't follow a linear plot line. It goes back and forth in time and subject, in entries that might be either a column or journal entries. They range from a few pages to a paragraph of only 38 words.

It is in those shorter, paragraph length sections that the reader gets profound looks into Ruby's character. In one titled "Absent," Ruby tells us:

The year my father moved out, I was absent from school more days than the kid in my class who had cancer. I was afraid if I went away for a whole day, my mom might leave too. (Page 66)

The above text is the entire entry for "Absent." A little glimpse, it gives such a vivid picture of a frightened child that it will echo with the reader in later chapters.

The shorter segments fulfill another purpose. They are a form of practice. Practice for Ruby in putting herself into her writing. Because by the end of the novel, she writes a column entitled "Need to Know" that puts it all on the line. It begins:

'Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.' Anais Nin wrote that, not me. I think she was right––happy endings are not for cowards.

You don't need to know any of this. But the things I don't reveal are the things I hold closest and fear losing the most. I work overtime keeping them veiled and camouflaged. You don't need to know that I walk around all day fearing the things that make me happy, and that I have been doing that my entire life." (Page 222)

Ruby, the character as well as the writer, has laid it all on the line at this point. While she is still afraid, she isn't the coward without a happy ending. The last segment is, in fact, titled "Happy Ending." As a writer, she has finally happened upon that certain something often missing from our work. That something that can turn a good piece of writing into great writing. Something so powerful that some writers are afraid of putting it into their writing at all.

Themselves.