JELL-O Girls: A Family History
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
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.
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Allie Rowbottom. (2018). JELL-O Girls: A Family History. Little, Brown and Company.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Allie Rowbottom. 2018. JELL-O Girls: A Family History. Little, Brown and Company.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Allie Rowbottom, JELL-O Girls: A Family History. Little, Brown and Company, 2018.
MLA Citation (style guide)Allie Rowbottom. JELL-O Girls: A Family History. Little, Brown and Company, 2018.
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- bioText: 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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- 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. - reviews
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January 22, 2018
In this intimate and intriguing debut memoir, Rowbottom explores the lives of the women in her family, specifically her mother and grandmother, members of the family that once owned the Jell-O company. She evaluates 100-plus years of Jell-O’s marketing campaigns through a feminist lens, exploring how Jell-O presented itself as a quick and easy dessert solution for white, middle-class women who, at the turn of the century, found themselves alone in the kitchen without “maids and nannies and cooks.” Rowbottom describes Jell-O’s early campaigns (“Teaching women, it turns out, was a tenet of Jell-O’s marketing... Jell-O, so pliable, so good, teaching them how to mold themselves to match it, pliable and good”) and provides a history of food’s role in the American imagination—including the low-calorie-food trend and later ad campaigns that sold Jell-O based on nostalgia. At the same time, Rowbottom explores how the women in her own family negotiated the social constructs of the times and within the family business: her grandmother Midge gave up her own aspirations to write when she had children; later, her mother Mary’s health complaints were ignored and dismissed as “hysterical” by doctors, resulting in a late cancer diagnosis. Throughout, Rowbottom asserts that a curse afflicted her family: “The curse was patriarchy.” Though Rowbottom’s focus on the “curse” sometimes distracts from the narrative, her memoir offers a fascinating feminist history of both a company and a family.
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May 1, 2018
Rowbottom chronicles her relationship to a legendary American food brand and the dark underside of its history.Jell-O was the author's "birthright." Purchased by her mother's great-great-great-uncle in 1899 for $450, the company was sold for $67 million two decades later. Jell-O gave the maternal side of Rowbottom's family unprecedented access to money, privilege, and power. At the same time, the wealth also seemed to bring family members "all manner of...misfortune," including alcoholism, cancer, and suicide. Her mother, Mary, believed that her own problems and health crises had come about as a result of this family curse, so she "rarely ate the stuff." The author begins the story with her grandmother Midge, who dreamed of becoming a journalist but instead found herself saddled with a traditional family life--which Jell-O celebrated in its many advertisements--that left her feeling unfulfilled. Growing up during the 1950s and '60s, her daughter Mary longed for life as an artist. However, the pressures for her to conform to traditional female roles ate away at her resolve, pushed her into a series of unhealthy relationships, and destroyed her well-being. Determined to understand both the Jell-O curse and her mother's emotionally fraught past, Rowbottom researched not only her family's troubled history, but also the history of Jell-O itself. She looked at how ad campaigns throughout the 20th century used Jell-O to prop up ideals of womanhood that either enforced ideas about women as domestic caretakers or made them feel guilty about "careers outside the home." The author also explores the medically inexplicable ailments that not only befell her mother, but also--as late as 2011-- young girls living in LeRoy, New York, the birthplace of Jell-O. Rowbottom delivers a moving memoir of a daughter seeking to understand her mother, family, and the place of women in American society, and the narrative also serves as a thoughtful, up-close-and-personal feminist critique of a cultural icon.A book brimming with intelligence and compassion.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from April 1, 2018
Rowbottom paints a fascinating portrait of the family behind one of America's most famous desserts. In 1899, the author's great-great-great-uncle bought the Jell-O patent from its inventor for $450, and reaped the financial gains as cupboards across the nation stocked the fruity gelatin treat. The privilege the family experienced as a result of the Jell-O empire was tainted, however, with some considering it cursed by a string of misfortunes, including bouts of cancer, suicides, and alcoholism. Rowbottom strives to tell her family history, particularly that of the women of the Jell-O empire, whose experiences were largely results of the times. She successfully draws readers into the details of their lives, which are at turns both intriguing and mundane. As Jell-O sales continue to decline, this account illuminates the rise of both an American product and dynasty. VERDICT The renown of Jell-O will attract a variety of readers to this memoir, and the storytelling will keep them turning pages to the very end.--Mattie Cook, Flat River Community Lib., MI
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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April 1, 2018
Jell-O, bland? In fact, since Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle smartly bought the Jell-O patent from its inventor in 1889, her family has endured a sadly high rate of suicides, alcoholism, cancer, and other inexplicable illness. Here, Rowbottom draws on archives furnished by her mother before her death to write a memoir that could spring the family curse.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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February 15, 2018
Jell-O, bland? In fact, since Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle smartly bought the Jell-O patent from its inventor in 1889, her family has endured a sadly high rate of suicides, alcoholism, cancer, and other inexplicable illness. Here, Rowbottom draws on archives furnished by her mother before her death to write a memoir that could spring the family curse.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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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... - sortTitle
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