The Belinda Chronicles

Linda Seidel's lightly fictionalized memoir lets readers feel what it's like for a naturally skeptical, yet persistently naïve, older woman to watch her parents age out of life, to think about the epiphanies they enable her to have, and to reflect on the lives of "elders" she didn't appreciate until she'd worn through some years herself. The elders whose stories Seidel reconstructs were quintessentially American--meaning complex, subtle and challenging--whether it's a "shell shocked" grandf...