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Note individuelle
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Francy Cohn Melnik Starr has written a tell-it-all, hard-to-put-down confession with the compelling title "Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued."
The Decatur woman fled to California after the breakup of her marriage to businessman Irving "Buddy" Melnik. Her struggle for happiness included successfully walking across hot coals barefooted, an afternoon at a nudist colony and many therapy sessions.
A synopsis in her words goes like this:
"With my marriage of 30 plus years becoming a minus, I moved from Decatur to California. Beginning with a dizzy bicycle spin down the single path, I covered a lot of territory. My bike lurched in all directors, and so did I.
"I share what good I gleaned from the avenues I pursued. The roads taken ranged from rugged to hilarious.
Added are the tips and tools that helped me get unstuck without coming unglued."
She said she began the manuscript in the early 1980s and then put it aside. Last year, she pulled it out, finished it and had it published. She said one critic reviewed one chapter with a favorable paragraph in the Los AngelesTimes. The critic was Charles Champlin. He said:
"One of the week's more interesting readings (from the Santa Barbara Writers Conference) was from a manuscript by a newly-divorced, middle aged woman seeking a new life in Southern California. The writer put an amusing face in a fairly universal and painful process of readjustment."
It seems that Melnik, the father of Francy's four daughters, fell in love again - with golf. "One day I woke up with sniffles and our marriage wasn't feeling well, either," she explains. "Our relationship had not only shifted, it had begun to tilt precariously."
Before she drove off to the West, she fixed Buddy a meatloaf, his favorite dish: "He used to complain that I didn't make it often enough. It was the best farewell present I could think of."
She wound up in a condo in La Jolla, a San Diego suburb, began reading singles magazines, joined a dating service and joined the community of the formerly married. Looking for Mr. Wonderful. She hooked up with Gregory, 40, for a while.
Continually turning to therapy, she tried transactional analysis, transcendental meditation, EST (Erhard Seminars Training) She calls the est staffers "zombies."
There was a trip back to Decatur for divorce proceedings. When she returned to La Jolla, she volunteered at a museum, wrote a few articles for the La Jolla Report and eventually met and married Bill Starr, a builder and developer who had been a baseball catcher and the owner of the minor league San Diego Padres. This was in 1987, five months after their first date.
Francy helped Bill write a book, "Clearing the Bases: Baseball Then & Now," published in 1989. Bill died in 1991 at age 80, a year after Buddy Melnik died. Francy then had what she calls "a three-quarters husband" for 9 ½ years until he died in 2007.
Now she has been a luncheon guest of President Obama and "on an ordinary day, I see friends, play duplicate bridge or write a book. I love my life and I'm grateful for it."
bfallstrom@herald-review.com|421-7981
About the Book
TITLE: "Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued"
AUTHOR: Francy Starr
PUBLISHER: Merlin Design
TYPE: Paperback, 157 pages
RETAIL COST: $15.95
AVAILABLE: Amazon.com; Barnes&
Nobel.com; Haines & Essick
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COHN
Arlene
COHN Gershom ( 1917 - 2013 )
