This lovely book quickly became one of my all-time favorite memoirs. Monica Wood's ability to describe childhood experiences rivals Harper Lee's in To Kill a Mockingbird. Although her subject is very sad--the sudden death of her beloved father when she was ten--it is also filled with characters full of love, kindness, and resilience, as well as grief and confusion. It also paints a vivid picture of a mid-century industrial town where working in the factory brought pride, unity, and security to families like Wood's.
And the writing is gorgeous--one gracefully crafted sentence after another. From the introduction: Her family's story was "powerful and engulfing, erasing all that came before, just like the mill that had made this story possible. In each beholden family, old languages were receding into a multicultural twilight as the new, sun-flooded story took hold: the story of us, American children of well-paid laborers, beneficiaries of a dream. Every day our mothers packed our fathers’ lunch pails as we put on our school uniforms, every day a fresh chance on the dream path our parents had laid down for us. Our story, like the mill, hummed in the background of our every hour, a tale of quest and hope that resonated similarly in all the songs in all the blocks and houses, in the headlong shouts of all the children at play, in the murmur of all the graces said at all the kitchen tables. In my family, in every family, that story—with its implied happy ending—hinged on a single, beautiful, unbreakable, immutable fact: Dad. Then he died."
No comments:
Post a Comment