Chapter 112

In high school on Grosse Ile, when we had to do book reports, the other girls were reading Daphne DeMaurier and there I was with Oliver Twist or Neville Shute or Commander Edward Ellsworth. So not just classical, but different.

I forced myself, after marriage, to read only female authors, thinking maybe I’d learn what I needed to know. My mother had once told me that everything she knew about being a wife and mother she had learned from listening to the radio. I’m not sure how much good reading Pearl S. Buck and D. E. Stevenson did me in that regard, but at least, they were strong women heroines in those books. I studied how they coped and how they acted, and probably, subconsciously, copied them.