Lacy Loar-Gruenler
Bio
Lacy Loar-Gruenler worked for a decade as a newspaper journalist and editor. In March 2023, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Harvard University.
Stories (16/0)
- Top Story - August 2023
The Pleasures of Hemingway and FreudTop Story - August 2023
In “The Pilot Fish and the Rich,” a vignette included in the restored version of Ernest Hemingway’s last novel, A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964, one can make the invisible claim that human minds are influenced by Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle. We avoid unpleasure and seek pleasure. However, the ego’s instinct for self-preservation attempts to replace the pleasure principle with the reality principle which, out of practicality, postpones the ultimate pleasure we are seeking. Our sexual instinct, which is difficult to educate, often succeeds in overriding the reality principle to the detriment of the organism (Freud 3-7). Poor Papa is the poster boy for the pleasure principle. This vignette is an anguished memoir of his love for two women, his first wife Hadley, whom he eventually betrays, and the woman he betrays her with, Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler9 months ago in BookClub
Blood Sisters
We moved to L.A. when I was eight; into one of those one-story, stucco, tile-roofed houses springing up from all the weedy, vacant lots along Norton Avenue. Construction was booming seven years after the war ended; all those GIs with their pretty wives and chubby-cheeked children filled the beige boxes on Norton, lined in front with sidewalks we scratched our names in with Popsicle sticks before the cement dried, and in back with miles of sky-high telephone poles, like giant soldiers in a row, marching all the way to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. I pouted about moving; I didn’t want to leave my old friends in San Francisco, but my mother told me stories about movie stars gliding along Hollywood Boulevard in Reef Blue Roadmaster Skylarks to restaurants with white tablecloths and no prices on the menus. Just after we moved, my father drove us downtown to ride the funicular, Angel’s Flight. Your heart feels like a freed bird when you look around from up there at the ziggurat buildings jutting even higher than you are, doves strutting on the windowsills. After that, we grabbed a chili burger at Tommy’s on Rampart and walked around a little. I liked the flowery smells surrounding all the beautiful women we passed, their silk summer dresses swooshing as they sashayed and smiled into the faces of their handsome men. It didn’t take me long to love the City of Angels.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler11 months ago in History
- Runner-Up in Father's Footprint Challenge
The Girl Who Loved Them BothRunner-Up in Father's Footprint Challenge
My dad had been dead twenty years when my French lover shared what he had learned about him. I knew some things. That French girls were beautiful. That he wanted to return to France and drive through Normandy before he died, to climb and dip over the emerald hills, the trees heavy with apples waiting to be plucked and pressed for Calvados. That death had a smell of its own. That he was lucky to live during that first wave storming Omaha Beach on June 21, 1944.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler11 months ago in Men