A Girl's Life: Horses, Boys, Weddings, and Luck

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Overview

In pleasant contrast to the recent flood of haunted childhood memoirs, A Girl's Life is about growing up in a functional family, about nurture, serenity, wonderment, and the stabilizing contributions an unencumbered heart makes in the life of an observant child. Marianne Gingher makes the events of a "normal" girlhood not only engaging but distinctly illuminating and explores rites of passage that are as persuasive in shaping an artist's sensibilities as are privations.

Arranged in a loose chronology, the tales document a southern white girl's middle-class initiation into the adult world. The first section, "Sanctuary," recalls Gingher's earliest impressions of family dynamics and ...

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Overview

In pleasant contrast to the recent flood of haunted childhood memoirs, A Girl's Life is about growing up in a functional family, about nurture, serenity, wonderment, and the stabilizing contributions an unencumbered heart makes in the life of an observant child. Marianne Gingher makes the events of a "normal" girlhood not only engaging but distinctly illuminating and explores rites of passage that are as persuasive in shaping an artist's sensibilities as are privations.

Arranged in a loose chronology, the tales document a southern white girl's middle-class initiation into the adult world. The first section, "Sanctuary," recalls Gingher's earliest impressions of family dynamics and shelter, a child's yearnings and resourcefulness. "Truths and Grit," the second section, deals with the tempering of bliss, a young girl's first encounters with corruption and mortality. In the final group of essays, "Metaphors and Pies," Gingher explores the contributions her recollections of childhood make in her ongoing trials as a parent and a writer. That her own childhood still permeates and inspires her present life is perhaps its greatest legacy.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In an essay in the New York Times Book Review, Michael Vincent Miller casually appealed for a memoir of childhood happiness and adult fulfillment. Gingher, director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, delivers on his request, extolling and sometimes sugarcoating the virtues of her North Carolina girlhood. From the beginning, as Gingher and her siblings embark on their summer trip to the grandparents' house, the cast of shiny, happy characters can do no wrong. Pies are always cooling on the kitchen windowsill, while kids entertain themselves trying on grandma's hats. Gingher's nostalgia for the 1950s and '60s yields some dreamy images, but her insistence that this was the last age of innocence rings false considering the political climate of the time and place. Without adult reflection on the context, she wistfully remembers the African-American maids employed by her family and white neighbors, and sighs, "This was the last era of affordable help for the middle class." When dark clouds encroach, they hover over other families; the bad tempers of other girls' fathers only highlight the goodness and pureness of her own. Potential land mines, such as when her mother discovers a Klansman's robe in the attic, are glossed over quickly and efficiently. Later in the book, Gingher's account of her own children is less confectionary and more grounded. Throughout, she writes fluidly and has a knack for detail, vividly capturing a child's-eye view. Readers who yearn for gentle, unconflicted memoir will treasure Gingher's work. B&w photos. (June) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
In her acknowledgments, Gingher quotes Michael Vincent Miller's plea, in the New York Times Book Review, for someone to write about a happy childhood: "Now there would be a revelation!" This memoir, her response, is destined to join Patricia Foster's All the Lost Girls (LJ 10/15/00) and Havel Kimmel's A Girl Named Zippy (LJ 2/01/01), two other memoirs of women growing up in small towns in America before the Vietnam War. Gingher (English, Univ. of North Carolina; How To Have a Happy Childhood) grew up in Greensboro, NC, before the town became famous for the civil rights sit-ins. Her parents loved each other, had easy relationships with their own parents, lived in nice houses, and could afford horses for their daughter. Gingher gently pokes fun at her privileged life by writing, "I am an optimist which means that I come from a long line of potatoheads and I probably write my fiction out of a need to understand this optimism, which is frequently more and more out of sync with a troubled world." The resulting cheery and memorable look at what Eudora Welty called "a sheltered life" contains no gossip or unkindness. Recommended for academic and public libraries with large Southern, memoir, and women's collections. Pam Kingsbury, Alabama Humanities Fdn. Florence Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780753152201
  • Publisher: ISIS Large Print Books
  • Publication date: 1/28/2002
  • Edition description: Large Type
  • Pages: 304
  • Series: Isis Softcover Series
  • Product dimensions: 6.18 (w) x 9.19 (h) x 0.75 (d)

Meet the Author

Marianne Gingher

Marianne Gingher is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her most recent book is Adventures in Pen Land.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xiii
Sanctuary
A Hard Place to Get To 3
Help 15
The Yellow Rose 23
Melissa's Shot 39
Escape Artists 43
Truths and Grit
I Was Impeached 55
White Girl's Burden 63
Kinds of Trouble 81
My First Marriage 101
Horses and Boys 105
The Rodeo Parade 129
Becky's Accident 145
Metaphors and Pies
The Heartfelt Home 161
Why I Did Not Go to Syracuse 169
At Home in Snow 183
Medium Cool 197
Wedding Music 209

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