Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman's Life, by Sandra Scofield
Mysteries Of Love And Grief: Reflections On A Plainswoman's Life, By Sandra Scofield. What are you doing when having downtime? Chatting or surfing? Why do not you aim to review some book? Why should be reading? Checking out is just one of enjoyable and delightful activity to do in your downtime. By checking out from several resources, you could locate brand-new details and also experience. Guides Mysteries Of Love And Grief: Reflections On A Plainswoman's Life, By Sandra Scofield to check out will be various beginning with scientific e-books to the fiction e-books. It implies that you could check out the e-books based on the need that you wish to take. Naturally, it will certainly be different and also you could review all publication kinds at any time. As here, we will certainly reveal you an e-book should be read. This publication Mysteries Of Love And Grief: Reflections On A Plainswoman's Life, By Sandra Scofield is the selection.
Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman's Life, by Sandra Scofield
Download PDF Ebook Online Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman's Life, by Sandra Scofield
Frieda Harms was born into a farming family in Indian Territory in 1906. Widowed at thirty and left with three children in the midst of the Great Depression, she worked as a farmer, a railroad cook, a mill worker, and a nurse in four states. She died in 1983. Sandra Scofield spent most of her childhood with her grandmother Frieda and remained close to her in adulthood. When Frieda died, Sandra received her Bible and boxes of her photographs, letters, and notes. For thirty years, Sandra dipped into that cache. Sandra always sensed an undercurrent of hard feelings within her grandmother, but it was not until she sifted through Frieda’s belongings that she began to understand how much her life had demanded, and how much she had given. At the same time, questions in Sandra’s own history began to be answered, especially about the tug-of-war between her mother and grandmother. At last, in Mysteries of Love and Grief, Scofield wrestles with the meaning of her grandmother’s saga of labor and loss, trying to balance her need to understand with respect for Frieda’s mystery.
Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman's Life, by Sandra Scofield- Amazon Sales Rank: #441643 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.10" h x .90" w x 6.30" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 176 pages
Review Throughout her depiction of her own family, Scofield kept me surprised—a moment of generosity when I didn't expect it or of anger when I didn't expect that. Mysteries remain as they must, but I trusted the insights as well as the mysteries. I thought it was a very beautiful book, smart and sharp. —Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and The Jane Austen Book Club Largely ungoverned by chronology, Scofield’s journey of discovery unfolds organically, true to the way memory works. Seeking to know her grandmother, she honors the lives and artistic bent of many women marginalized by gender and poverty in the early to mid-twentieth century. This is a unique and necessary work. —Lorraine M. López, author of Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories and The Darling
About the Author A native Texan, Sandra Scofield divides her time between Missoula, Montana, and Portland, Oregon. She has written seven novels, a memoir, and a craft book for writers. An excerpt from Mysteries of Love and Grief won first place in Narrative magazine’s 2014 Spring Story Contest. She is an avid landscape painter.
Where to Download Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman's Life, by Sandra Scofield
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. A Beautiful Memoir by a Master Storyteller By Tricia Fields What a beautiful book. The writing was pure and from the heart, honest and heart breaking, but mostly hopeful and motivated by love. Here's a quote from the first few pages that convinced me I'd found a book that would take me on a compelling journey. "When the dream inside you is as vivid as the one you are living, when there is no one to answer the questions that plague you, and your melancholy feels like a chasm, it is thrilling to discover that stories fill you up." - I thought, that's it. She summed up an entire life for me in one sentence. That's the power Scofield has as an author. Her grandmother's life, her mother's too short life, her aunts and cousins lives, and the men, "who didn't stay, the ones who couldn't be found. You heard the door slam but you didn't know where he had gone. Men were extraneous. They kept proving themselves to be just what she expected." The mystery of her life if unfolded, not always in chronological order, but in layers, complex and extraordinary, as life often is. Scofield is a longtime favorite of mine - a finalist for the National Book Award. Grab a cup of hot tea and a comfy chair and settle in for a nice long read.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. MYSTERIES OF LOVE AND GRIEF by Sandra Scofield weaves a tapestry of ... By Rebecca Gabriel MYSTERIES OF LOVE AND GRIEF by Sandra Scofield weaves a tapestry of family, event and place with great originality and vivid truth. Nothing about the story of Ms. Scofield’s grandmother, Frieda, is conventional, nor is the incisive and layered structure of the narrative. The stories overlap and build on one another, following the tributaries of fact, emotion, and event. The reader is drawn into the core of the characters and stories, much in the same way one experiences memory and the untidy unfolding of life. Ms. Scofield’s story about the birth and loss of her son, is unforgettable and equals or surpasses Anais Nin’s story of the same subject. The stories in “Mysteries” is a treasure trove of gems, collected together to dazzle and incise the heart – R. Gabriel
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. A poignant, powerful story, beautifully written By Len Joy Novelist Sandra Scofield’s memoir, Mysteries of Love and Grief, is composed of a series of essays about her family. Frieda, her maternal grandmother, widowed in her 30s with three kids to raise in the midst of the Great Depression in hardscrabble Texas, is the principal character in an ensemble that includes Edith, Scofield’s free-spirited, fragile and doomed mother, an ever-changing cast of husbands and boyfriends, and Scofield, the precocious, spoiled, determined-to-escape child of these complicated women. This story feels like Scofield sitting in a comfortable chair telling us stories about her family. In the first chapter, “The Story Test,” Scofield explains how she came to write this book about her grandmother. I finished it and thought, “Okay, I understand this woman, Frieda.” And then I read the next essay, about the distribution of Frieda’s meager estate and I was surprised. Surprise was a common element in all of these essays, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising. Scofield probes the mysteries of her grandmother and her mother and the father she never knew and the baby she lost and with each discovery there is more mystery. Scofield has a clear eye. She loves Frieda and her mother and many of the other characters, but is able to still see clearly both their mysterious strengths (such as Frieda’s never complain – never explain guiding principle) and their failings. She’s writing about real people and she makes them real for us. They are unbelievably generous and courageous and petty and shortsighted. It is written with love. She treats everyone fairly, even the characters she doesn’t love. At the end of Scofield’s chapter, “Anger” she learns that because of her misdemeanor drug offense during the early 70s, the FBI came to her grandmother’s house to intimidate her, but her grandmother stared them down. Scofield writes: “I hadn’t learned the beautiful power of anger when it is rooted in God’s love…I had never seen it on the faces of strong people standing up to injustice and suffering because I had never looked… Something stirred: a sorrow for the many time I had hurt her with my absences and my wasted opportunities and her steady love. I ached for her to care about something better, steadier and more deserving than me, something worthy of her defiance. Something holy.” A poignant, powerful story, beautifully written.
See all 8 customer reviews... Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman's Life, by Sandra Scofield
No comments:
Post a Comment