Product Description

In 1959, when Sandra Scofield was fifteen, she came home to stay in West Texas after years in Catholic boarding schools. She believed her presence would inspire her invalid mother to live. What she found a fractured family; a distracted, dying mother nudged her into the tumult of late adolescence and the awakening of her sexuality. More than forty years later, Scofield looks back on her Catholic girlhood and the ways in which her relationship with her mother was grounded in their intertwined aspirations for holiness, achievement, and love. Writing on the brink of old age, she looks back ruefully but without bitterness, forgiving both her mother's frailty and her own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1578116 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-29
• Released on: 2005-05-03
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .50 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Scofield's account of her childhood and teenage years will ring familiar with many readers. Although the book is framed by a specific time (the 1950s and '60s) and place (West Texas), its themes of wanting to be a perfect daughter, of trying to grasp the concepts of religion and God as a child, of fitting in among peers who seem far more mature are universal. Scofield's mother, Edith, lived a difficult life. A striking beauty, she had political ambitions yet was held back by a disapproving mother, two understandably needy young daughters and an often-absent husband. Edith, formerly Methodist, converted to Roman Catholicism when Scofield was a child, and brought Scofield and her sister up in the church. Much of Scofield's memoir concerns her years at Catholic boarding school, where she tried to find a balance between having an intimate relationship with God and fearing the iron-fisted nuns who monitored her every movement and prohibited contact with Scofield's adored and non-Catholic grandmother. Unlike many memoirists who write of growing up Catholic, novelist Scofield (Opal on Dry Ground; Plain Seeing; etc.) does not take a lighthearted look at her tumultuous childhood; rather, she marks her memories with an intense, reverent seriousness. When Scofield returned home at age 15 to live with Edith, the mother she'd idolized practically since birth, she was devastated to find her showing signs of grave illness, which turned out to be chronic nephritis, a kidney disease (she died a year later). Poignant and clearly cathartic, this is a tender, melancholic coming-of-age story.
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From Booklist
The author of Opal on Dry Ground (1994), a finalist for the National Book Award, Scofield here turns her hand to a memoir recalling her Catholic girlhood and the long months of her mother's dying. It has taken her 40 years to write "past the anger and grief and silence, back to my mother." In her carefully measured prose, Scofield makes vivid the repressive 1950s, especially for Catholics, specifically for women. Her mother, Edith, bore her out of wedlock in poverty-stricken circumstances. Although Edith eventually married and had more children, she was plagued by ill health. Her meager prospects seemed only to fuel her imagination and her desire to set herself apart. She fervidly embraced Catholicism and, in so doing, found the key to a better education for her children. When Edith succumbed to kidney disease, Sandra, angered and bewildered by her mother's death, and shut out by her father's new wife, entered adolescence with a vengeance. This is a deeply reflective and heartrending account conveying all that is lost when a child loses her mother. Joanne Wilkinson
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Review
"Sandra Scofield has written a breakthrough book."