Raise your hand if you’re Mormon. Keep it raised if you’re also female. Sat through Young Women’s lessons, yes? Keep your hand up. Lessons on marriage and motherhood? As in, this will happen to you? Ah, yes, I still see a lot of hands. Marriage and motherhood didn’t happen? Uh-huh. Only a few hands still up. Just as I thought. Julie Rowse sat through [...]
Russell Baker, a satirical columnist for the New York Times, wrote his Pulitzer-prize-winning memoir, Growing Up, when he saw that he had become, in his children’s eyes, an old bore who constantly started sentences with “In my day . . .” Maybe, he thought, it would work better to dig in and tell all the stories, instead of just dominating dinner conversations with his [...]
I’ve been waiting a long time to get my hands on this week’s book, Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt, in which Laxalt writes a memoir of his Basque father. The Basques, as we knew them in my childhood, were a people that came to America from their old homeland on the border between Spain and France. Their surnames were a mouthful of syllables and [...]
