It is the old Western movie gimmick: A Stranger Comes to Town. But not until late in my career did I realize that a single thread ran through them, that I'd used the same strategy to catch the reader's attention. I'd always prided myself on how unlike my books were from each other in settings and subject matter.But before we roll about with laughter at the spectacle of this young many from the Bible Belt, raised on fundamentalism and comics, though apparently already well versed in polypharmacy - struggling to master the Wisdom of the East, we might pause a moment to note the names of George Bernard Shaw, Louis Lumière, Thomas Edison, Yeats, Havelock Ellis, Maeterlinck, the educator Rudolf Steiner, Krishnamurti, and Gandhi, all of whom had been influenced by or involved in theosophy at one time or another and would, not doubt, have welcomed Elvis with open arms as a fellow traveler in the belief that magic is inherent in us all. Elvis' quest led him through the study of all religions from Judaism to Buddhism and the teachings of theosophy with its belief in pantheistic evolution, reincarnation, the mystic the psychic, the spiritual, and the occult - in short, all the Aladdin lamps that lit up the 1960s.Each feels the other has no manners, is disloyal, corrupt, insensitive - and has never put in an honest day's work in its life. Both the poor and the rich have always found precisely the same grounds on which to complain about each other. What is always overlooked is that although the poor want to be rich, it does not follow that they either like the rich or that they in any way want to emulate their characters which, in fact, they despise.

1.2 Afterword to The Dud Avocado (2006).

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy