Dear Reader,

Today’s guest author, Ginny Kubitz Moyer writes historical fiction set in her native California. Her debut novel, The Seeing Garden, takes place on a grand country estate in 1910, and her novel A Golden Life (a ‘Kirkus Reviews” Best Indie Book of 2024) moves from 1938 Hollywood to the Napa Valley. Ginny loves classic movies, rainy mornings, and gardening. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Ginny’s new book is The World at Home, a coming-of-age story about a young dressmaker living in WWII San Francisco.

You can reach out to Ginny at: https://ginnymoyer.org/contact/

Welcome to the book club, Ginny…

Never too old for paper dolls

Few toys are as simple as paper dolls. They don’t require batteries or recharging. Aside from perforation, they haven’t changed much over the generations. In spite of this simplicity–or perhaps because of it–paper dolls were my very favorite childhood toy.

In the early eighties, when I was a kid, paper dolls were sold at the local pharmacy. Sometimes I found them at toy stores, and occasionally I’d come across the old-fashioned kind in museum gift shops. I was always thrilled to add to my collection.

On weekends or summer afternoons, my sister and friends and I would gather with our dolls. We’d settle into the living room, using boxes and manila folders to set up houses for our paper families. My mother (bless her!) let us keep them up for days at a time, obligingly stepping over our cardboard walls.

Our dolls had busy lives. They went to picnics and concerts, to school and weddings (every one of us had the Bridal paper doll set). Grooms aside, however, our paper communities were overwhelmingly female. There were some boy dolls, but because their clothes were uninteresting, we basically ignored them. It was a world of mothers and daughters, sisters and friends.

Because paper dolls are so easy to store, I still have mine. Many of the outfits have a “G” scrawled on the back, a reminder that my friends all had the same sets, and clothes were easy to mix. Some of the outfits are missing their paper tabs. Many of the dolls sport tape on the neck (always a paper doll’s Achilles heel). But the mere sight of those dolls makes me happy. They are a bridge between childhood Ginny and adult Ginny, between past and present, between a paper toy and where it can take your imagination. They pull me back into the time when a summer afternoon felt like forever.

I have another precious paper doll memory, too. I’m nine years old, staying with my grandparents for the weekend. I’ve just bought some paper dolls at a store downtown: three girls, a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. They’re not perforated, so Grandma is helping cut them out. We’re sitting at the kitchen table, my sister and my beloved grandmother and I. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and the room is flooded with sunlight. I remember Grandma humming as she moves her scissors around tiny dresses and sunsuits.

Was she delighted to be playing with paper dolls again, for the first time in fifty years?

I like to think she was.

— Ginny Kubitz Moyer
https://ginnymoyer.org/contact/

Thanks for reading with me. It’s so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com