The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie

by Wendy McClure

Overview

For anyone who has ever wanted to step into the world of a favorite book, here is a pioneer pilgrimage, a tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a hilarious account of butter-churning obsession.

Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder-a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she's never been to, yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family- looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. She immerses herself in all things Little House, and explores the story from fact to fiction, and from the TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment or sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "the Laura experience." Along the way she comes to understand how Wilder's life and work have shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American West.

The Wilder Life is a loving, irreverent, spirited tribute to a series of books that have inspired generations of American women. It is also an incredibly funny first-person account of obsessive reading, and a story about what happens when we reconnect with our childhood touchstones-and find that our old love has only deepened.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101486535
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/14/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	610,063
File size:	690 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Wendy McClure holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of I’m Not the New Me and the creator of the online journal Pound, as well as the humor site Candyboots. She is a columnist for Bust, a regular contributor to the website Television Without Pity, and her writing has also appeared in Glamour, The Chicago Sun-Times, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. She lives in Chicago.

Table of Contents

1 Our Past Life 1

2 Whose Woods These are 28

3 Going to Town 50

4 Good Girls and Golden Curls 74

5 There is a Happy Land Far, Far Away 100

6 The Way Home 141

7 There Won't Be Horses 179

8 Fragments of a Dream 209

9 Anywhere East or South 249

10 The Road Back 281

11 Be It Enacted 299

12 Unremembered 321

Acknowledgments 329

Selected Bibliography 333

What People are Saying About This

Alison Arngrim

"A howlingly funny, historically thorough and irresistibly mad trip down the rabbit hole of the Laura Ingalls-Little House obsession that has consumed an entire generation of women. I spent seven years on the prairie and this book made me want to run out and buy a butter churn! Mandatory reading for all “bonnetheads” - and the people who love them!" --( Alison Arngrim, TV's Nellie Oleson and New York Times bestselling author of Confessions of A Prairie Bitch)

Editorial Reviews

""The Wilder Life" is a tribute to the "Little House" books that's both reverent and irreverent-in a thoughtful, hilarious way. I couldn't put it down."
-Gretchen Rubin, author of "The Happiness Project"

"Mandatory reading for all "bonnetheads" - and the people who love them!"
-Alison Arngrim, TV's Nellie Oleson and "New York Times" bestselling author of "Confessions of A Prairie Bitch"

"Wendy McClure's "The Wilder Life" evoked so much of an almost palpable nostalgia that I felt like I was walking into my childhood dollhouse every time I opened the book. I absolutely loved this book."
-Julie Klam, author of "You Had Me at Woof "

""The Wilder Life" perfectly captures the wistful, poignant, goofy nature of Little House lust. It also offers some important lessons on late 19th century land rights and butter churning. Now that's my kind of book!"
-Meghan Daum, author of "Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House"

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From the Publisher

Highly engaging, often hilarious book. . . the author's pilgrimage arrives at what feels like well-earned literary nostalgia.

Boston Globe

Fans of the ‘Little House' series will eat up this book like a hot Johnny cake, and well they should, because McClure highlights that intangible something about the series that strikes a deep chord in even the most casual reader.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Deeply human, darkly hilarious… an entertaining and touching book — and an essential for Little House fans.

NPR "What We're Reading" blog

Even for people who've never read Laura Ingalls Wilder's work, The Wilder Life is an insightful, entertaining look at our relationship with pop culture, how it changes from youth to adulthood, how it intersects with the real world, and how other people relate to the personal things we love.

The A.V. Club

"[The Wilder Life] has the power to charm even those who shudder at the thought of gingham, calving or salt pork.…McClure's touch is as light as Ma's best biscuits, but the result still sticks to your ribs."--( Laura Miller)

Salon

You need not have been an obsessive fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder in order to appreciate McClure's memoir The Wilder Life— because, really, she's not just talking about this one series, but about the magic childhood books can hold throughout one's life...Breezy and funny and fun.

Jezebel.com

BUST magazine columnist and children's-book editor McClure (I'm Not the New Me, 2005, etc.) takes an engaging road trip in search of a remembered "Laura World."

"I was born in 1867 in a log cabin in Wisconsin and maybe you were, too." Like millions of other young readers, mostly girls, the author had lived the dream and then—possibly impelled by the disappointing way the series peters out—moved on. Hoping to recapture the magic after glimpsing that world years later in a re-reading Little House in the Big Woods (1932), McClure checks out the LHOP canon's continuing role in online communities, lines of commercial products, the perpetually-in-syndication TV series and a steady stream of literary and other cultural spinoffs. The author also tries her hand at butter churning and farm cookery, and sets out with an obliging companion on a Midwestern pilgrimage. McClure presents a merry travelogue that features stops at Pepin, Wisc. (where Wilder was born), Rocky Ridge Farm (where she died) and most of the other widely scattered sites the peripatetic Ingalls clan set down in between, as well as meetings with fellow pilgrims, a wade in Plum Creek, a weekend at a self-sufficient farm (made scary by a group of "end times" survivalists) and even a later jaunt to the upstate New York farm where Wilder's husband Almanzo grew up. McClure also ruminates on the qualities that give Wilder's fictionalized but oh-so-evocative memoirs their enduring appeal. In the end, she moves on once again—coming to recognize the beguiling joy and simplicity of Laura World, but at a slight remove brought on by years and other experiences.

Many others have made the same pilgrimage, but not, perhaps, with such a winning mix of humor and painless introspection.

Kirkus Reviews