Journalist turns to fiction with 'Dirty Girls'

By CARRIE SEIDMAN
SCRIPPS HOWARD
"The Dirty Girls Social Club" by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez (St. Martin's Press, $24.95)
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's first novel, "The Dirty Girls Social Club," set off a bidding war when it appeared in the publishing world early last summer.
Hailed as the "Latina Terry McMillan," Valdes-Rodriguez eventually earned nearly half a million dollars for the rights to this, her first published work of fiction.
Publishers had long awaited the Hispanic counterpart to McMillan, whose 1992 "Waiting To Exhale" sold more than 2 million copies and sparked the black publishing niche.
'Latina Terry McMillan'
They found her in Valdes-Rodriguez, a better fit in the world of fiction than in the journalism arena, where she spent the six years previous, most recently at The Albuquerque Tribune in New Mexico.
Valdes-Rodriguez is a woman, Latina or no, with decidedly strong opinions and a frequently barbed tongue. That got her into trouble in the newspaper world, where a vitriolic e-mail accusing her Los Angeles Times superiors of racism and sexism nearly did in her career.
But those same qualities serve her well in this story of six Latina friends and fellow graduates of Boston University who gather twice a year to touch base with each other and share their stories.
The strength of her language and the facility with which it flows (although claims that Valdes-Rodriguez wrote the book in a Starbucks in just six days are apocryphal) makes the sucias -- dirty girls, as they are referred to in the book -- lively and, at least initially, believable.
Circle of friends
The six group members are Lauren, Usnavys (so named because her Hispanic mother admired the word on the bow of a U.S. Navy ship), Rebecca, Sarah, Elisabeth and Amber (later to rename herself Cuicatl).
Over the course of some 300 pages -- with alternating chapters written in first-person accounts by each of the women -- we come to know each of the sucias and their individual neuroses.
Usnavys is the one with the enormous appetite for food and designer shoes, who fails to appreciate her unsophisticated but sweet Latino boyfriend.
Sarah, the dedicated mom, has a handsome husband who turns out to have a violent temper and a wandering eye.
Rebecca is, in Lauren's words, "Miss Perfect" in dress, demeanor and career success, but is married to an emotionally cold trust fund baby.
Amber is a singer/songwriter, dedicated to making a political and racial statement with her work.
And the stunning Elisabeth, popular host of a morning TV show, is, it turns out, a closet lesbian.
But the most powerful of the six is Lauren. One would be hard pressed to believe Lauren is not based on the author herself. Lauren is the ringleader of the dirty girls and the most outspoken member of the group.
Valdes-Rodriguez claims the characters were not based on personal acquaintances but rather on her imagined renderings of the life of each woman.
It might have been better had she actually drawn more heavily from real life, however, since the more she gets into each character's fictional life, the more each one becomes rather one-dimensional and stereotypical.
What saves it all is Valdes-Rodriguez's wonderful writing, delicious humor, biting sarcasm and impressive intelligence.