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A Writer of History

~ by M.K Tod

A Writer of History

Tag Archives: family memoirs

Book club reads Educated by Tara Westover

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by M.K. Tod in Books I've Read, Reading

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

a survivalist memoir, author Tara Westover, Educated by Tara Westover, family memoirs, memoirs relating to Mormonism, memoirs set in Idaho

Book club unanimously endorsed Tara Westover’s well-received novel of growing up in a survivalist Mormon home in the hills of Idaho. The words used to describe it included: compelling, horrifying, unbelievable, shocking, inspiring, and head shaking. Yes, this memoir had a profound effect on all of us. I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads.

A quick synopsis: Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag”. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard.

Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough to be admitted to Brigham Young University. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her to Harvard and Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

We found much to discuss. Who and what influenced Tara and set her on a path to become educated? Where did she get the strength and determination to change her life? What factors caused her brother Shawn to be both loving and abusive to his young sister? What aspects of the Mormon faith drove the behaviour of Tara’s father? Who betrayed Tara and how? Why did Tara’s mother fail to protect her children from their father? Does the title refer to Tara’s formal education or some broader concept of education? Did Tara write her memoir from a position of anger or hurt or love? We debated each question enthusiastically and with compassion.

My own reading of Educated produced over 100 highlights.

Describing her mountain home: “In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquility born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence.”

About learning at home: “Learning in our family was entirely self-directed: you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done.”

Her father’s paranoia (there are many sentences related to this): “Dad took a twenty from his wallet and crumpled it. ‘Not this fake money. In the Days of Abomination, this won’t be worth a thing. People will trade hundred-dollar bills for a roll of toilet paper.”

Her father’s position on school: “whoring after man’s knowledge instead of God’s”

On taking dancing lessons: “I was ashamed to see so much of my legs. Dad said a righteous woman never shows anything above her ankle.” and “Learning to dance felt like learning to belong.”

On her upbringing: “All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine — that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself.” and a little later: “What kind of lunatic would come back here once he’d escaped?”

On being in the outside world: “for the first time I felt the immensity of the gap. I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles [her father’s word for other Mormons], on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between.”

Two of Tara’s personal insights: “To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty but in this frailty there is a strength.” and “It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”

I could go on! The story of Tara’s family and what she endured and how she survived will stay with me for a very long time.

FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION – and other books – FOLLOW A WRITER OF HISTORY (using the widget on the left sidebar)

M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel, TIME AND REGRET was published by Lake Union. Mary’s other novels, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www.mktod.com.

 

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Cavell Avenue Memoirs by Erik N. Pyontek

24 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by M.K. Tod in Guest Posts, Historical Non-Fiction, Writing about WWI, Writing about WWII

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

America in the first half of the 20th century, author Erik Pyontek, family memoirs, immigrant stories, memoir, memoir set in New Jersey, Memoir set in Trenton New Jersey, memoirs about the American dream, memoirs of first half of 20th century, Scattered Dreams by Erik Pyontek, stories about Trenton New Jersey, When the World Was Young by Erik Pyontek

Erik N. Pyontek is a writer and high school history teacher who lives in Trenton, New Jersey. He’s written a two-part series Cavell Avenue Memoirs based on the life of his maternal grandmother. Cavell Avenue Memoirs consists of When the World Was Young and Scattered Dreams. Erik’s passion for his family story comes through in today’s guest post.

~~~

And so, it came to pass… and I remembered the words Mrs. Wynright had spoken during the war… that in a blink of the eye, what you think will last for the rest of your life vanishes, like the day into night, and in time you have to search your mind to wonder if it had ever been at all.

These words grace the closing pages of Cavell Avenue Memoirs, a two-part series based on the life of my maternal grandmother, Anne Woods, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants who grew up and spent the first fifty-one years of her life in Trenton, New Jersey. Anyone who has ever been there knows that Trenton’s fortunes, like many American industrial towns, fell hard in the second half of the twentieth century. Cavell Avenue Memoirs is set in the first half– the city’s golden age, starting on the eve of the first world war, and ending in the years immediately following the second one. At the heart of the story is a house—30 Cavell Avenue—where much of the main character’s life unfolds.

It was my intention to take the reader on a journey back to that time and place—to a city of big departments stores, vaudeville houses, and street hucksters, of elegantly dressed women in grosgrain and chintz, and the newly arrived immigrant still donning peasant wool. It’s a city of coal dust and lavender. At every turn, there is contrast; a thousand stories bound within a singular, collective narrative.

The impetus behind the book came from my own experiences growing up, in the 1970s.   I was very close to my maternal grandmother. She was a constant presence in my life, though she didn’t live with us. Her tiny Cape Cod, built in the 1950s, was my second home. From an early age, I understood that something wasn’t quite right about the house she lived in. It was packed to the hilt with furniture– there was a massive mahogany dining table wedged in one of the bedrooms, along with a Queen Anne desk and a Victrolla. The kitchen set was too big; a piano sat just a few feet away from the kitchen table. All the contents of grandma’s old house were squeezed into the new one, and they told a tale of another place, and time, that I was fascinated to know about. When I was ten, my mother agreed to drive me back to where my grandparents had lived before. The experience changed my life.

I spent much of my young life listening to my grandmother’s stories. Typical of her generation, she was a private person and didn’t share much about the past with anybody. But it seemed to me that nobody—none of us young pups anyway—cared to ask. I was different. The future history teacher in me begged explanation. Why did you move here? Where did you live before? What was it like? Tell me about your neighbors. Tell me about your family. And over time, the stories came. I whiled away countless afternoons in grandma’s parlor, listening. The stories were intoxicating. Child labor, Reds on the street corners, changing sir-names so as to acquire mortgages and white-collar jobs, neighborhood bookies who ran underground lotteries, bank failures and mass evictions, German prisoners of war being paraded down the city’s main thoroughfare on route to internment, air-raid black outs, the great cathedral where she prayed that was eventually burned to the ground by a madman who roamed the city giving sermons, hunger and deprivation transformed into bounty and mobility. And all this, right in Trenton, New Jersey? Truly, fact was better than faction.

That’s how my book came to be. After grandma died, I processed through my mourning by writing down the stories I’d spent a lifetime listening to. It was my childhood friend, Jerilyn, who pushed me to actually do something with them. My story would likely have never gotten further than the desk drawer if it wasn’t for her effort in helping me edit and publish it.

Cavell Avenue Memoirs is a dance across a time and place, of people passing in and out of each other’s lives, of the want of home and respectability, of the fundamentally human desire to establish domesticity, and especially of change. It’s a story that reveals some unpleasant truths about human insatiability, fear, and bias. It also touches on aspects of American history often avoided because they’re uncomfortable to confront. Mostly, though, it’s the story of a vanished time that, as a kid, played on my imagination. I wanted so much to have known, and walked through the world my grandmother vividly conjured in her stories. Writing the book, I felt I did. Reading it, I hope, will give my audience the chance to do the same.

Thank you, Erik. You’ve already made these memoirs sound very intriguing. Best wishes for their success and I hope you continue to write.

When the World Was Young by Erik Pyontek – Anne Lewis, the daughter of East European immigrants, tries to hold her lot of siblings together through the tumult of the first half of the 20th century. At the same time, she falls in love and begins a family and home of her own that comes to symbolize the stability she yearns for. Her version of the American Dream, however, does not always coincide with those around her, and her strong will to overcome the odds often brings loss, disappointment, and a deep determination to establish a place that her family can call home.

When the World Was Young is the story of a house, the first-generation family that occupied it and Trenton, New Jersey, the city that enveloped it over a fifty year span.

Scattered Dreams by Erik Pyontek – In the aftermath of World War Two, the country embarks on a journey of transformation marked by unprecedented economic growth and heightened expectation. In this time of remarkable bounty, collective triumph, and personal tragedy, Anne Woods finds herself caught in shifting currents of change that signal the twilight of one life, and the uneasy transition into a new one.

Scattered Dreams continues the story of a house, the first-generation family that occupied it and Trenton, New Jersey, the city that enveloped it over a fifty-year span.

FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION follow A WRITER OF HISTORY (using the widget on the left sidebar)

M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel, TIME AND REGRET was published by Lake Union. Mary’s other novels, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www.mktod.com.

 

 

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Historical Fiction Blogs

  • Burton Book Review
  • English Historical Fiction Authors
  • Historical Novel Society
  • Historical Tapestry
  • History With a Twist
  • Passages to the Past
  • Passages to the Past
  • Reading the Past
  • The History Girls

History Blogs

  • BBC – WW2 People's War
  • Canada At War
  • Edwardian Promenade
  • First World War

Other Blogs & Sites for Book Lovers

  • Dizzy C's Little Book Blog
  • Midwest Book Review
  • Words and Peace

Writing Craft & Industry

  • Jane Friedman: Writing, Reading, and Publishing in the Digital Age
  • The Book Designer
  • The Shatzkin Files
  • This Itch Called Writing

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