It is the summer of 1975 and Mary Jane is 14 years old. She lives with her lawyer father and homemaker mother in an upscale Baltimore neighborhood. Shy, naïve, and lacking a huge group of friends, Mary Jane’s life consists of going to her parents upper crust country Waspy country club, attending church services and singing in the choir, listening to Broadway show tunes (rock and roll is verboten), and helping her mother make the nightly dinner. But Mary Jane’s life is about to go through a huge transformation in some major ways in Jessica Anya Blau’s superb novel Mary Jane.
Mary Jane procures a job acting as a nanny for the Dr. and Mrs. Cone’s daughter, Izzy. Because Dr. Cone is a psychiatrist and he and his family live in the neighborhood, Mary Jane’s mother assumes they are the “right people” so she initially has no problems with Mary Jane’s new job.
But the Cones couldn’t be any different the Mary Jane’s family. Whereas Mary Jane has grown up in a household with with rigid ideas and rules, the Cone family is free-spirited, raucous, and quite sloppy. Dr. Cone works from home, and though Mrs. Cone is a homemaker she doesn’t do a whole lot of homemaking. She doesn’t cook, the house is cluttered, and the refrigerator is filled with food that has seen better days. However, Mrs. Cone is kind, friendly, open-minded, and like her husband, clearly loves her daughter, Izzy. The Cone family makes Mary Jane feel completely welcome from the moment she enters their house.
The Cones are about to have some special guests at their house, Jimmy and Sheba. Jimmy is a mega rock star and Sheba is an actress who once had a top-rated TV show. Jimmy is a drug addict, and he and Sheba are hoping Dr. Cone can help Jimmy with his addiction and get back on the right path even though the 1970s was a time of debauchery. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were truly a thing.
Though Mary Jane is sheltered, she is aware of Jimmy and Sheba and how famous they are. And she’s about to get a glimpse behind the curtain of glitter and glamour that is celebrity. She learns about what it’s like to deal with addiction, the intricacies of marriage (both Jimmy and Sheba’s and the Cones), and how to take care of a rambunctious, precocious, and clingy five-year-old like Izzy.
Mary Jane is also gets more acquainted with rock and roll, and she is even asked to sing along with Jimmy and Sheba, and they are impressed with her vocal talents. Despite being a bit nerdy, everyone is taken by Mary Jane. She brings some semblance of normalcy to the the lives of the Cones and Jimmy and Sheba. Mary Jane is devoted to Izzy. She also is a whiz in the kitchen, using her mom’s recipes to feed everyone.
Mary Jane continues to get an education while working for the Cones. Her world is changing from a strict black and white to a kaleidoscope of color. She begins to realize how rigid her home life is and is appalled over her parents thinly veiled anti-Semitism (Dr. Cone is Jewish) and racism (Mary Jane’s mom flips when her daughter is photographed with the gang at a record store in predominantly black neighborhood and it ends up in the local newspaper).
But Mary Jane also sees that just because Jimmy, Sheba, and the Cones aren’t totally square like her mom and dad doesn’t mean they are perfect as Jimmy falls off the wagon, adulterous acts are committed, and marriages aren’t always “until death do us part.” And maybe Mary Jane’s mother will prove to be not such a stick in the mud after all.
I absolutely loved this book. I found the characters richly drawn and as someone who is of Izzy’s generation, Generation X, I completely recognized the time and place of the mid 1970s, which Blau captures with utter perfection. Mary Jane was a character I rooted for, smart and sensible, but so willing to learn about different worlds. I also appreciated how Blau didn’t turn Mary Jane’s story into a cliché, getting hooked on drugs or getting seduced by either Jimmy or Dr. Cone. Mary Jane is a wonderfully original and entertaining coming-of-age story.
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