A Girl's Life

by Gingher, Marianne

• ISBN13: 9780807126851
• ISBN10: 0807126853
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-01
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr

Summary

In pleasant contrast to the recent flood of haunting 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 home place 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 lo

Author Biography

Marianne Gingher: Director of the Creative Writing Program and assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xiii
SANCTUARY
A Hard Place to Get To	3	(12)
Help	15	(8)
The Yellow Rose	23	(16)
Melissa's Shot	39	(4)
Escape Artists	43	(12)
TRUTHS AND GRIT
I Was Impeached	55	(8)
White Girl's Burden	63	(18)
Kinds of Trouble	81	(20)
My First Marriage	101	(4)
Horses and Boys	105	(24)
The Rodeo Parade	129	(16)
Becky's Accident	145	(16)
METAPHORS AND PIES
The Heartfelt Home	161	(8)
Why I Did Not Go to Syracuse	169	(14)
At Home in Snow	183	(14)
Medium Cool	197	(12)
Wedding Music	209