Working Without a Net: My Intimate Memoirs

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

“Lynne Gordon” is the invention of a woman accustomed to making a name for herself, on radio, television, and in the newspapers; as a columnist, interviewer, broadcaster, actress and consumer advocate, and as head of the Ontario Status of Women Council, among other things. Her name, spelled out in full, is or has been Lynne Levinson Smith Grabois Faulk Castaneda Gordon.

These surnames represent her father, stepfather, and three husbands; five men’s surnames, followed by the one she chose for herself from a telephone directory. Her story is told with startling candor, from her all but loveless childhood in Manhattan through her three unhappy marriages. The ordeal she shared with her Texan husband John Henry Faulk, father of her three children and a victim of the persecutions of the McCarthy era; the punishing trial that followed in which Faulk’s name was cleared; and the bitter aftermath years later when that same trial became the subject of a biased television drama, Fear On Trial, makes absorbing reading.

Lynne Gordon is a dedicated feminist, and her biography closes on a strong statement of her beliefs. She feels that in relying upon the support and protection of the men in her life, she has been “working without a net.” Now totally self-reliant, she has become the strong and capable woman so boldly depicted in this very readable autobiography.