...And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer

Whole lives are played out, and one is part of them in intimate but not claustrophobic detail. The place is Ohio, the fictional town of Waynesboro based on Santmyer's home Xenia. The book begins with the two main characters' high school commencement in 1868 and proceeds to follow their lives and the lives of their families and neighbors until 1930. Sure, some of the attitudes may strike today's reader as reprehensible, however, they ring true. That's the flaw, and for my money, the only flaw in this magnificent slice-of-life novel.

It was a little better, but, man, what a mess. I went out and got a newer edition half way through the read, hoping against hope that it would be better. This time, the poor editing and the plethora of typos drove me nearly to distraction. Not anymore.ġ/2007 It's been years since I read this book, and I've been reflexively putting on list of favorites for years. It still resonates with me in a thousand ways, and I'm still bewildered by the relentlessness of time, but I can't like any of these people, really.

And with the acknowledgement that privilege is like water to a fish or air to a teenaged girl- invisible, un-seeable, often insurmountable. I can walk away without regret, without anger, but with finality. Like the Club in Anne's reflections at the end of her life, this book meant far more to me once than it does now. There are no shades of grey here, merely nostalgic black and white vignettes that illuminate varieties of prejudice in high contrast. The mincing distaste for sex of any stripe. The homophobia that runs so deep it dare not speak its name, and all lesbians must die a gruesome death alone, even if they are only 14 years old and potentially gay. The casual, dismissive, unaware racism for anyone not of one's own tightly-knit clan.

My family, and all the reasons I ran clear across the country to escape them are laid out here so clearly. This time, nearly all I could see was the resemblance to my own upbringing in Ohio. I encountered Marcus Aurelius herein for the first time, little realizing how heavily his words would influence my life. I was in my late teens or early 20s, embarking on my first live-in relationship with the man who would become my first ex-husband. This was a fascinating revisit on a number of fronts. It's been more than a decade since I read this, and I finally found the audiobook, courtesy of the access my failing eyesight has given me to the governmental libraries for the blind.

...And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer