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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Saving
Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers by
Elizabeth Edwards |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Optimism I defy any
reader of Elizabeth Edwards’ new book, Saving
Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers, to get
through the whole thing with smiling and tearing up. Being moved by what she
says tends to sneak up on a reader. Her plainspoken style makes us
comfortable, and before we know it, we are feeling for what she is saying.
This book is a tribute to strong communities, to networks of people who help
each other, to both friends and strangers who are willing to help others.
Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 5, “ When I was in eighth grade,
I sat one rainy day under the covered review platform on the There was a time in the late l960s when a world that had
existed for decades ended. The world of men’s colleges, muscular and intense,
and women’s colleges, serene and pastoral, and the weekend trips from one to
the other. A time of hard-sided suitcases carried by well-dressed young women
onto local trains, and then by sport-coated young men to the grand old houses
of widows where bedrooms had been transformed into bunk rooms for visiting
girls. I wasn’t Franny Glass, but like Franny, I took the train to the men’s college, in my
case, the The point of a women’s
college, or so I had always thought, is that young women, uninhibited and unintimidated by young men, would blossom and find their
rightful place in communities, and they would take that sense of confidence
and sometimes entitlement with them into the world. You would have to ask
someone who was inhibited or intimidated whether it worked. I was neither. I
had been president of my class; I had been brash enough to get kicked off the
cheerleading squad for talking back to a teacher. I am pretty certain I
didn’t need to feel less inhibited, less intimidated. In the first weeks,
still wearing my freshman beanie (yes, we really had to wear them), I was
already flexing a robust independence. Asked in freshman English to write an
essay that started “I began to become an individual when . . . ,” I did not write the recipe-style essay
(add a pinch of fun, bake for eighteen years) that won the best grade.
Instead I wrote an essay about the abortion conflict and got one of the worst
grades. And it was fine with me. There is a
camaraderie at a women’s college that is intellectual and social and
political. This is not to suggest we were made out of one cloth. The student referendum
on whether to allow us to wear pants to class, rather than dresses, failed,
for Pete’s sake . . . in 1968. A
fellow student turned me in one time when, after getting out of physical
education late, I wore my shorts—under my buttoned raincoat—to class in
violation of that dress rule. (She should know, if she reads this, that I could name her but choose not to.) We dated
fraternity men who wore sports coats and Marines from As a freshman at Mary
Washington, I had a junior roommate. While my parents tried to figure out how
to pay for college, the freshman dorms filled up, and I found myself in a
grand old dormitory rooming with Christine Cole from Warren, Ohio—her blonde
hair shaved like a boy’s, her paintings of nudes propped along every wall of
our room, her expensive clothes hanging, tags still attached, on every door
frame. Other than my younger sister, she was my first roommate, and I wasn’t
sure my parents were going to let me— dressed head to toe in a peach Villager
outfit, except for my red beanie—stay in a room with this . . . grown-up. But they did. I stayed, and
Christine tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce me to coffee and cigarettes
and, successfully, to bridge and to her circle of literary friends—Christina
Askounis, as beautiful as she was eloquent, Linda
Burton, sexy and mysterious, Susan Forbes, daffy and adorable and brilliant,
and Ann Chatterton, maternal and warm. They were
sophisticated; I was naive but smart enough to sit silently on the sidelines,
learning as I was listening, the sponge all mothers hope their children will
be—although I suspect this was not what my mother hoped I would absorb. I
hoped I could, by osmosis, acquire their ease with words, with professors,
with men. With the girls my own age—with Nancy Bolish
and Karen Adlam, Ernie Kent, Debbie Oja—it was easy, weekdays of work and weekends of fun,
fraternity houses and trips home, boys like Kellam
Hooper and Toby Summerour, and vegetable soup in
Ann Carter Lee Hall. I wanted to be grown and
sophisticated. And I wanted to be young and carefree. I succeeded at neither.
I was still a girl, used to boundaries and rules, struggling with a complex
world, made more complex by war. I tried to push aside the Vietnam War, which
had dominated my life—and not in a positive way. But I could not, and not
simply because it was still in the news but because it was still in my house.
My father was in charge of all the Navy ROTC units across the county, and
when I would call or come home, he would complain about “those college
students” who had fire-bombed an NROTC unit at one school or were staging a
sit-in at another. I was two people then—the carefree college student, hanging on to what I thought was a normal
American life, and a military daughter. My political opinions were forming,
but I was quiet. Or quiet at home. I was in Washington, in Georgetown at the
Tombs, a watering hole frequented by Georgetown University students, when the
word went out in March 1968 that Lyndon Johnson was withdrawing from the race
for the Democratic nomination for President. The place exploded into
celebration. I don’t recall
that I was in the Tombs that night, but I was somewhere in D.C., shocked that
Johnson would not run for reelection. Edwards goes through much of her memoir
in a breezy way, but all readers know that the death of her son, Wade, was
just around the corner, as is her breast cancer. Saving
Graces is a moving book full of optimism, and packed with the many ways
that friends and strangers reach out with a helping hand. On any day that you’re
feeling low, this is a fine book to pick up. Steve Hopkins,
December 18, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Saving
Graces.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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