January to June 2019 Book Club Biannual Newsletter

“PEOPLE DON’T COME INTO OUR LIVES BY ACCIDENT” 

(LISA WINGATE, BEFORE WE WERE YOURS, P 913)

As we approach October and the upcoming fifteen-year anniversary of our book club, I can’t help but ponder the truth of the above quote. I don’t believe the Butler Women of Wisdom are connected by accident. Although through the years, we have lost members and added new members, the vitality of our group, I’ve observed, is inspired by change - new voices adding more substance to our own. We are all unified, however, in seeking a higher level of ourselves, finding enlightenment through the characters in our books and most of all through each other. Our meetings go beyond the books we read and into the most important subjects of our gatherings, simply sharing our lives with one another. While the club has evolved (I was 44 years old when we started!), we have experienced children graduate, go off to college, more graduations, weddings, the birth of grandchildren, new jobs, new homes, trips all over the world, divorces, retirements, health challenges, and grief . . . everything - all the joys and losses of life. As we go forward and continue to discuss and analyze new chapters of our own human journeys, let us remember the powerful wealth of wisdom we have to share because of our commitment and connection to our book club.

Looking back on this year, 2019 has been flying so quickly; with my grandson Grant born in May and another grandchild on the way, I am caught up the world of baby hype. This newsletter will help to review this year of reading from January to June, and as we remember the books and the stories they tell, I know each of us will also remember the months we read them and how the hype of our own individual lives intertwined.

All of our books this year depicted the great lengths our characters will go when inspired by passion. To recall, Cheryl set 2019 in motion with the title The Storyteller’s Secret: A Novel by Sejal Badani. Badani’s book took us to India with Jaya a young journalist from New York as she uncovered the secrets of her grandmother’s life and private passions. As always when we read about other cultures, it is often difficult to imagine the way women have been and often still are treated. Jaya’s grandmother, Amisha, had to prove her worth as a young wife by bearing three grandsons, but she was not valued, sadly, for her exceptional talent for writing stories. It was a kind and handsome British soldier who noticed her creative ability and encouraged her to write. However, when Amisha had to make a choice between her two great loves and the safety and welfare of her children, she ultimately gave up her deepest desires as any mother would do.

In its conclusion, this story does have a satisfying ending as Jaya ultimately discovers her true self through her grandmother’s legacy. “I think about my grandmother and the choice she made between love and her life. It was a choice that no person should ever have to make, but she did it with grace and a heart that always thought of others first” (715).

Next up, in February we read Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate. This was Kathy’s pick and another book that sends a young woman, Avery, a federal prosecutor, searching into her grandmother’s past to discover hidden secrets. In Wingate’s book, we start out in Memphis, Tennessee, where the story of Avery’s grandmother begins. This piece of the story was based on the real-life adoption scandal that started in 1924 and continued to 1950. Our main character’s grandmother Rill and her siblings were stolen from their home and taken to an abusive orphanage before being sold off to various families. The children were given new names and forced to play by the rules of the home’s superintendent, whose character is based on the accused perpetrator Georgia Tann. Luckily, Rill was adopted by well-to-do parents and given a new name and an upbringing that provided her with the best of everything including social status. However, the loss of her real family was a hurt she held deep inside her throughout her life, keeping it concealed from the man she married and the children she raised as privileged members at the center of politics in Aiken, South Carolina.

As Avery uses her lawyer’s prowess, she follows the leads to discover her aging grandmother’s heartrending past. Like Jaya in Badani’s book, Avery’s discoveries force her to come face to face with her own state in life and the passion that’s missing. Questioning everything, both professionally and personally, she receives a piece of profound wisdom that helps her to reevaluate her choices, “A woman’s past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. . . To hear the tune, she must only stop talking. To herself, I mean. We’re always trying to persuade ourselves of things.”

Moreover, this story is mostly about the love between siblings and its powerful transcendence over place and time.  “The love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as present as a pulse.” I think of my own sisters and understand the words to be true.

Following Kathy’s book, in March we read Marybeth’s selection Where the Crawdad’s Sing by Delia Owens. Through its pages, we continued our visit to the south along the coast of North Carolina in a quiet town called Barkley Cove. Deep in its undiscovered marshes lives our main character Kya. The book spans her harrowing childhood and incredible life of unfathomable loneliness. Abandoned by her mother and siblings, then eventually her alcoholic father, from a very young age Kya must support herself to survive. At times the unimaginable sadness of Kya’s story is gut wrenching as she struggles all alone hiding from the public eye. School was hurtful, as she was teased and bullied, so she learned to outsmart the truant officers. She only allowed a few people into her small self-made world. Luckily, Tate, a boy she had seen once as a young child befriended her and taught her how to read and discover a love for poetry. As the two became close, they eventually fell in love. However, just when Kya had given Tate her trust, he never returned to her after he went off to college, “...loneliness had become a natural appendage for Kya, like an arm. Now it grew roots inside her and pressed against her chest.” Kya finds solace in nature and her ability to record and publish her notes on the wildlife of the marsh.

Although, as a result of her deep loneliness, it was no wonder that Kya fell for the smooth lines of Chase Andrews, the town sweetheart and sports hero. Luckily, Kya was not ready to give herself to another man so easily. She remembered her mother’s advice, “Unworthy boys make a lot of noise,” and the advice she learned from her observations of nature, “males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone.”  But fighting off Chase turns into the biggest fight of Kya’s life when he is found dead and Kya is accused as the number one suspect in his murder. It is a red ski cap that holds the mystery of Chase’s death and gives this book a very surprising ending. 

Marking the beginning of the Easter season, we read Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan as my pick for April. The book is based on the life of Joy Davidman, an American writer who fell passionately in love with the infamous British writer, C.S. Lewis. Although Callahan’s work is fiction, she vows in telling the story that she stayed as close as possible to the facts pertaining to Joy’s life as she found them in letters, essays, biographies, articles, speeches, etc. The book begins in New York where Davidman struggled with a failing marriage to the American writer, William Lindsay Gresham. In one of her lowest moments when Gresham was missing on one of his frequent alcoholic binges, Joy experienced a profound spiritual revelation, an apparition of the divine. She then realizes that there is a God. After reading the book The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, Joy sought out Lewis for answers to many of her questions about Christianity. Consequently, she wrote Lewis a letter and he responded.

The correspondence between Joy and Lewis continued for many years through the lows of Joy’s marriage until she had taken more than any woman should from her despicable, cheating husband. Through Lewis’ encouragement, Joy moved to Oxford, England, taking her children with her and began a life as a struggling writer. Lewis was always her champion when times grew extremely hard, but he failed to offer her the most important support of all, his undivided love. It was not until Joy was pronounced incurable of metastatic carcinoma in her bones, a painful disease which racked her body, that Lewis realized how important Joy was to him and finally professed his love to her. They married and upon her death, Lewis, a veritable gentleman, continued to raise Joy’s two boys.

Although the story is bittersweet, during Joy’s lifetime of searching in all the wrong places for her own identity, we can learn from her mistakes. Believing her sexuality to be her worth, Joy doubted her value when it failed her in numerous relationships. At the end of her life, she found that her true treasure was inside her all along. In Joy’s letters, we are reminded of a quote from Lewis’ novel Prince Caspian. Aslan the lion says, “You doubt your value. Don’t run from who you are.”  This is a powerful lesson for us all, especially as women.

The House We Grew Up In by Lisa Jewel was Sharon’s pick for May’s read. This book was quite different than the previous four of 2019. In this book, we are faced with the psychotic mind of a hoarder. Jewel presents us with the story of Lorelei, a wife and a mother of three, who seems to have a passion for amassing what most would consider garbage. All the while, her family struggles to keep their own sanity as they watch Lorelei fall deeper and deeper into her obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Like in every dysfunctional family, no one comes out unscathed. Megan, the oldest, struggles with control issues.  Beth her younger sister, strains with failure to launch syndrome and lusts for her sister Megan’s life, namely Megan’s husband. Their younger brother, Ben, who was traumatized from the suicide of his twin brother, follows a path of complete destruction, while Lorelei’s husband picks up the pieces Ben leaves behind and starts his own new life. Even Vicky, Lorelei’s lesbian lover, is not left untouched by Lorelei’s mental disorder. After some pleading from her two children, Vicky finally moves out of Lorelei’s home and lets Lorelei alone, “the master of her peculiar castle.”

In reading The House We Grew Up In, one is inclined to think about our own absurd behaviors and delve into some self-analysis. Why are we the way we are? Do some of our tendencies stem from the way we reacted to a parent’s dysfunction? Regardless, all of us are just trying to live each day the best we know how. As the voice of wisdom in the book, Meg offers her sister some profound advice that is appropriate for everyone, “And things sometimes happen that don’t fit in with how we think the story should go, but we just have to take a deep breath and get on with it, not sit there sulking because it’s not what we were hoping for.”

Lastly, for this newsletter, Ginnie picked the book for June, Remember Reeny.  A local author, C. F. Bellis, AKA Hubba Hipple as most of us from Chicora remember her, has blessed us with a novel that recounts the emotional essence of our town during WWII. Although it was a project of love for Hubba, telling her mother’s story;  it is a tale that captures the tone of an era, a love story of a woman’s passion during the difficult times when the “greatest generation that ever lived” left home to fight a war on the other side of the world. The book is a poignant reminder to us all that because of circumstances of which we have no control, life will continue in ways we never expect.

Our book club was very lucky to have Hubba join us at our meeting. It was so much fun recalling the book’s references to many local sites and citizens. Seeing our town through the lens of the 1930’s and 40’s was a perspective that, I have to say, I never really thought too deeply about before. For one, I now look at all the taverns I knew as a child as places that were vital to our community during the hardest of times. They were utterly important as gathering spots where our ancestors shared their celebrations and losses. Through the book, I visualized the strength of our women, many like Reenie who were mentioned in the book, who struggled each in their own way to maintain the home front during the war.

It was also fun to imagine people whom I thought I knew well like my childhood best friend’s mother Shirley Craig, Reenie’s sister, in a way that gave her even more substance than her role as a wife, mother, and one of the best bakers in Chicora.  Hubba accurately describes her aunt’s vivacious character, something that Shirley has maintained throughout her life.

In addition, it was fun to piece more of a story to the memories from my childhood I had of Reenie and her husband Ross. All I could recall were the parties my family attended at their home and the beauty and Grace of Hubba’s mother. I also remember the talent and musical ability of Hubba and her sisters, but I had no framework for their lives that could have been very different if not for the United States entering the War in 1942. How many futures around the world were changed in the same way as Reenie’s? This is why, the novel by C.F. Bellis, Chicora’s very own Hubba, appeals to all of us and is already worthy as a treasured piece of our local town and country’s history. We were all so honored to have her be our very first author to attend a Butler Women of Wisdom meeting!

What a wonderful year of book selections we have had so far! Get ready for our next book if you haven’t already read it. We will be discussing Jody’s pick The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister at 6 PM on August 21 at the Hardwood Cafe. It sounds like another invigorating read based on the texts coming in, so remember to join us next Wednesday for our discussion!

Finally, along with this newsletter is an updated version for your records of our club’s book list.  I have also added the member’s name who selected each book in the emailed version of the list because we sometimes have a hard time remembering who is next! (What does that say about the median age of our group!) Consequently, as we continue in alphabetical order by our last names, Barb Direnzo will be picking our next title for September's meeting. Heads up Barb!

Your sister in reading for wisdom,

Tammy