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

by Marianne Gingher

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.

A meditation on the comforts of homeplace and family, A Girl’s Life celebrates the last era in America, the 1950s and 1960s, when it was still possible to enjoy a cynicism-free girlhood—when “it was still safe for children to take gifts from strangers and not yet unwise for them to leave the doors of their hearts unlocked.” As Eudora Welty wrote in her autobiographical memoir One Writer’s Beginnings, “A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” The seventeen personal narratives collected here corroborate Welty’s conviction.

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.

Did the way Marianne Gingher grow up compel her toward the writing life? Certainly the impact of that distant time, specific people and events, sensory-steeped moments, and the privilege of being allowed to dream as well as do enriched and fostered the writer’s imagination. By turns funny, provocative, jubilant, and tender, A Girl’s Life is perhaps most notable for both exalting and justifying the place of happiness in a writer’s development.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807126851
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2001
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Born on Guam, Marianne Gingher grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she still lives. Director of the Creative Writing Program and assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she is the author of Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hit; Teen Angel; and How to Have a Happy Childhood—a psalm to childhood’s dawdling pleasures.

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

Editorial Reviews

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.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

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