The Last of the Good Girls: Shedding Convention, Coming Out Whole

by Mary Ann Woodruff

Overview

Mary Ann Woodruff's Last of the Good Girls is the compelling memoir of a child of the 1940s who followed all the rules-until she couldn't any more. Like many in her generation, she married Mr. Right, kept house, raised her children, joined a church, and volunteered in her community. Then, at midlife, she had to dismantle it all to find her true self. To her surprise, that included falling in love with another woman. It was a truth she had difficulty embracing. Woodruff had spent decades as a faithful church woman, serving as a Presbyterian elder and consulting with congregations and at every level in the denomination. When her church continued to insist on overtly restricting roles for gays and lesbians, she dared to speak out. To do so, she had to first face down the voices of homophobia clamoring in her own head-and all those forces that had compelled her to conform. A rigorous exploration of her emotional and spiritual interior led her to new understanding of her self. In lyrical, heartfelt prose, embellished with poetry, she tells how she was drawn to acknowledge a truth she didn't welcome, how an unexpected love called her out of deep fear, and how her whole family reshaped itself into a new circle of support.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781490552965
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	08/23/2013
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	5.24(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

Mary Ann Woodruff grew up in Rochester, New York, and graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a major in English literature. She and her husband migrated to the Chicago area and then to the Pacific Northwest, where they raised their two children. She completed master's degrees in Librarianship (University of Washington) and Organization Systems Design (Antioch University, Seattle). An organization development consultant, she focused her practice on team building, conflict management, and large-scale strategic planning events. It was during this period that a tsunami of self-understanding began to transform her life and that of the Woodruff family. Now married to a woman, she is pursuing her life-long love of writing and occasional public speaking.

Editorial Reviews

2013-11-18
A woman in her 70s looks back in this coming-out memoir. Woodruff sees the Good & Plenty candy she loved as a child as "a perfect metaphor for the rules that governed my growing up, indeed framed nearly the first fifty years of my life": "If you were Good, there would be Plenty. It was as simple and as complicated as that." Born in 1938, she grew up fearing her mother's anger, which trained her to become "so attuned to my mother's feelings that I wasn't aware I had any." Woodruff was mindful of other people's feelings, too: She refused to run for president of her high school when nominated, since no girl had ever been elected and she didn't want to outshine her boyfriend. Thinking for herself, she writes, began first with Mount Holyoke and then the Presbyterian Church, where she became involved in programs, retreats, committees and study groups, getting married to a man and raising a family. Eventually, she developed her own consulting practice in organizational development. Through therapy, poetry and workshops, feminism helped push her to discover her own homosexuality, and today, she's married to Mary, her partner of 15 years. Woodruff writes well and thoughtfully, although her introspection can seem a bit self-centered: "my being married was a complication that needed to be honored" as she fell in love with Mary, she writes, but calling marriage a "complication" might sound dismissive to some readers. Her justifications for leaving her husband for a woman sound somewhat similar to an adulterer's: "the attraction was stronger than common sense, and I couldn't deny it." Fortunately, her ex-husband seems to have bounced back well, asking only for her to "play me or trade me." Woodruff's 15 poems included here sometimes have impressive imagery, but they're often too literal and obvious: "No longer a child, / having found my woman voice I will speak out." But Woodruff's honesty, particularly about giving up what some might call a conventional life, is admirable. A sensitive account, though it doesn't offer much remarkably new insight.

Kirkus Reviews