Gee, That Was Fun: 7 Days of Mayhem, 1983

WInner, Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award, 2024. An air conditioner falls from a New York City apartment window onto a woman's head. Two dozen people contract botulism after eating patty melt sandwiches at a shopping mall restaurant in Peoria, Illinois. A Vermont attorney sues to control medical decisions for a disabled New York infant. Ronald Reagan wears a robe and slippers to match the interior design of his White House residence. U.S. senators debate the meaning of the word "false." A body falls from the sky in the Bronx. Senator Jesse Helms plots creative ways to annoy his colleagues while his wife, Dot, polishes her book manuscript titled Interesting Deaf Americans. "Reading Gee, That Was Fun was disorienting in the best way, like reading Renata Adler as scatterplot historical reportage. Fromberg refracts the titular seven days into vignettes that set the absurd and the banal, the outrageous and the humorous, the fictional and the archival, on the same stage as the political theater of the Reagan era. What results is a riotous trip through shopping mall food courts and Senate chambers full of anarchic wit and an astute rejection of easy metanarrative in favor of a much wilder, and perhaps truer, mayhem." Gabriela Garcia, author of Of Women and Salt "With uncanny wit and a pointillist painter's eye for detail, Gee That Was Fun eschews the grand episodes on which historical fiction so often relies, reminding us that the fabric of our lives and the trajectory of our country, for good or ill, are composed of the smaller moments: the daily decisions made and not made, the tiny revelations, the ordinary failures and triumphs. A fascinating and endlessly readable novel in vignettes." C. Matthew Smith, author of Twentymile "You'll read Robert Fromberg's Gee, That Was Fun with a continuously mounting delight at what he is pulling off. Are these people and events real or fictional? You soon won't care, because you're in Fromberg's world now, a specific week in 1983, where you'll find the profound amid the quotidian, as long as you know exactly where to look. Just don't have the patty melt." Justin Bryant, author of Thunder from a Clear Blue Sky

About the Author :
Robert Fromberg wrote the memoir How to Walk with Steve (Latah Books, 2021), which won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for memoir; the essay and story collection Friends and Fiends, Pulp Stars and Pop Stars (Alien Buddha Press, 2022); and the novella Blue Skies (Floating Island Publications, 1991). He taught writing for many years at Northwestern University and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.