Mama Dearest
by E. Lynn Harris
Karen Hunter Publishing. 389 pages, $25.99
IF IT’S TRUE that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, then in Mama Dearest, the last novel by the late E. Lynn Harris, it stays close to home through three generations. The novel’s central character,Yancey Harrington Braxton, had been a real star once: a Broadway star with fancy clothes, a fancy apartment, and any man she wanted. So she knows what it’s like to make it big but now finds herself acting in a bus-and-truck company production of Dreamgirls, tromping around the country with a bunch of third-rate actors. The one saving grace of this gig is that it gives her a chance to hang out with her best friend, a gay man. But this isn’t enough to compensate for being around a bunch of wannabe actors. This road show is something she’s only enduring while she waits for her second big break.More than anything, Yancey wants to be famous again.
When S. Marcus Pinkston picks her up outside a Miami club after another boring cast party, Yancey takes one look at his money, his fine apartment, and his Egyptian cotton sheets, and she knows she’s found what she’s been waiting for. It doesn’t hurt that S. Marcus is fine in bed—and that he knows people who can finance a reality show for Yancey to host. And that he has all sorts of ideas for making it happen. There’s only one problem: Yancey’s mother Ava is getting out of jail. Although a stay behind bars has added fifteen pounds to her frame, Ava still looks good enough to catch a rich man’s eye, or so she thinks. Turns out Ava is an even bigger diva than Yancey, which makes things rather interesting when Ava, as a condition of her parole, moves in with her daughter. That’s when Ava starts angling to take over Yancey’s reality show.
Meanwhile, sixteen-year-old mega-singer Madison B. has always wondered what her mother would have thought about her talent and fame. After winning the biggest prize on one of those talent shows, she rose like cream to the top of New York’s entertainment world. She’d been raised by her father Derrick, who showered her with affection even when Madison the diva proved to be a handful—like her mother, Yancey Harrington Braxton. The latter learns this truth by and by, whereupon she informs Ava that Madison is her daughter, whereupon Ava starts scheming how she can use her granddaughter to get a piece of the reality pie, as it were. But first she has to finish destroying her daughter…
Reminiscent of an early Jackie Collins novel, albeit somewhat more plausible, Mama Dearest is filled with trash, cash, and flash. E. Lynn Harris brings high society and low-lifes together in this story of greed, wealth, greed, wrongful payback, and more greed. As in many of his novels, Harris lets his central character (Yancey) tell her own story, while the secondary characters’ stories are told from a distance.Ava’s story, for instance, is coolly detached and Madison’s is bouncily teenish. This makes for a sassy mother lode of enjoyment in novel form.
Mama Dearest is the second novel by Harris to feature Yancey as the protagonist. Interestingly enough, the author ended this novel in a rather different way from his previous works, hinting that there was to have been another in the Yancey Harrington Braxton series. Perhaps an unfinished manuscript lies in a drawer somewhere, waiting to see the light of day. In any case, E. Lynn Harris is a novelist who gave pleasure to many readers. He will be missed.
Terri Schlichenmeyer is a freelance writer based in Wisconsin.
