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Charles Bukowski did not often write about holidays, or at least not in the happy sappy way most write about them.

In the novel Women, he tackles Thanksgiving, giving his unique spin and mixture of hope and dirty realism.

The full quote follows:

Thanksgiving. It proved you had survived another year with its wars, inflation, unemployment, smog, presidents. It was a grand neurotic gathering of clans: loud drunks, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, screaming children, would-be suicides. And don’t forget indigestion. I wasn’t different from anyone else: there sat the 18 pound bird on my sink, dead, plucked, totally disemboweled. Iris would roast it for me.

As he notes in the novel, and mentions in the interview below (at around the one and a half minute mark), the holiday presented an issue for his alterego in the book, Henry Chinaski, when he agrees to celebrate with two separate women.



Related: Charles Bukowski Poem “Independence Day”

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