"Secret Storms" by Julie Mannix von Zerneck and Kathy Hatfield~Adoption Story & Guest Post

SUMMARY :

A pregnant, upper class nineteen-year-old Philadelphia Main Line debutante is confined, against her will, to a state mental hospital. She spends her pregnancy surrounded by the mentally challenged and the criminally insane. On April 19, 1964, she gives birth to a child, whom she is forced to give up for adoption.

A loving middle-class couple adopts a month-old little girl from Catholic Charities. She is adored and cherished from the very beginning. It is as though she is dropped into the first chapter of a fairy tale—but we all know how fairy tales go.

This is the story of a mother and daughter. Of what it is to give up a child and what it is to be given up. Of what it is to belong, what it is to be a family and what it is to yearn deeply, and to never lose hope—because anything is possible.

In this exquisite memoir, Julie Mannix von Zerneck and Kathy Hatfield recount the stories of their lives. Deliciously strange, surprising and sweetly funny, this tenderly written book takes us on a wild and frightening journey. Written in two distinct and deeply expressive voices, their stories seamlessly meld together in a breathtaking ending.
PARTICULARS OF THIS BOOK :

Published by:  Blue Blazer Productions
Pages:  330
Genre:  Non-fiction/Biography/Memoir
Authors:  Julie Mannix von Zerneck and Kathy Hatfield
Learn more:  http://www.secretstorms.com


ABOUT THE AUTHORS and THEIR STORY :

Picture of Julie (left) and Kathy (right) when they were featured guests on the Katie Couric show
recently.

Here's a link to the show!!!    http://www.katiecouric.com/videos/adoption-reunion

 

Julie Mannix von Zerneck was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She traveled with her parents, living in Paris, on the isle of Capri and in several boarding schools around the world, before settling down at Sunny Hill Farm at the age of nine. There, she lived with a menagerie of animals, including a cheetah and eagle and her very own baby spider monkey. After attending the Neighborhood Playhouse in NYC, she became an actress on Broadway, had running roles in three soap operas and guest starred on many TV series. She is married to the TV producer, Frank von Zerneck. They have three children and four grandchildren and reside in Toluca Lake, California, where, for 26 wonderful years, they were the owners of Portrait of a Bookstore. She is a lifelong collector of antiques and antiquarian books.

 

 

Kathy Hatfield was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up surrounded by two brothers, twenty-five cousins, and two sets of grandparents in Indialantic, Florida. She attended Florida Atlantic University, after which she worked as a mortgage broker while running her own small business selling men’s neckties. She now teaches World Literature at a high school in Florida where she serves as English department chairman. She and her husband of 25 years live in a quaint beachside community with their two daughters. She is a freelance writer and moderator of the Adoption Reunion Stories Facebook page, which currently has over 2,800 members. She’s a competitive runner and participates in 5k races when she’s not correcting papers.

 

 

 

A VIDEO ABOUT "SECRET STORMS"

 

Can be seen on their website at:   http://www.secretstorms.com

 

 

 

GUEST POST !!!!

 

A Bookish Libraria is proud to bring you this wonderful guest post from Kathy Hatfield regarding her transition experience.  Thank you, Kathy, for sharing your intimate family life with us here.

 

 

"Cut from the Same Cloth"

           

            I’ll admit it;  I’m vain.  Upon discovering that I had a full-blooded sister, whom I had never met, my very first thought was does she look like me?  As an adopted child, I had spent my entire life wishing I looked like someone in my family, wishing I had my mother’s eyes or my father’s thick hair, wishing that -- for once-- someone would say you look just like your mother (or father, or brother, or cousin...).     Five years ago, that wish came true.   At the age of 44, I reunited with my birth mother, who eventually married my birth father and went on to have two more children:  my brother and my sister.  I had grown up with only brothers, and was completely enthralled with the idea of having a sister, who - quite possibly - would look just like me. 

            As it turns out, I had known my sister for decades.  Watched her on TV in the 1980s.  Scheduled my college classes around the soap opera on which she appeared daily.  For two years, she played the role of Lou Swenson, the love interest of  John Stamos, on the wildly popular General Hospital.   And for two years, I had no idea she was my sister. Now, on this side of the adoption reunion, I can’t believe I didn’t see it:  we don’t just look like one another, we also share the same laugh, the same intonation of voice, the same sideways tilt of the head when we speak in earnest.  And after spending time with her, I have also realized the semblance resonating on a much deeper level.  I saw it when she spoke about politics, about literature, about her daughters;  I saw  a passion, a fire in her belly, a glimpse of what made her tick - and understood it immediately.  We, though strangers, had been cut from the same cloth - and I felt the same thing that other biological siblings must feel - an unspoken connection.

            But is that all it takes to be siblings?  Shared features, shared mannerisms, shared passions? Can a sharing of chromosomes supersede years of playing catch in the backyard and fighting over who gets to ride in the front seat?    I had assumed that our genetic bond was the only requisite to be sisters, but I was wrong;  we will never have the shared memories of childhood, which are the links in the chain that fasten us to our families. Yet, what remains is my greatest hope: that we may come to realize that sisterhood is not a destination, but a journey to be shared and enjoyed.  And maybe someday, we too will come to form our own memories in common and redeem what could have been our past. 

Kathy Hatfield

 Kathy far right, Julie next to her in pink jacket.



THE BOOKISH DAME REVIEWS :

Reading this book was a rare experience for me.  I had no idea it would be so engaging.  From the first sentence, I was captivated by the story of Julie and how she was thrown into an asylum for the mad and criminally insane simply because she had become pregnant as a teenager.  This is a book told from the depths of the souls of two amazing women.  One not to be missed!

Julie writes from the heart about her experiences.  I simply could not put her book down.  You can "hear" her voice coming through the pages.  There is not a moment's pretension from this woman, nor is there an ounce of self-pity.  Rare in these circumstances.  Her side of the story of loss and reclamation is pure and true.  I appreciated that honesty from a woman who had suffered the indignities and betrayals she had.

Kathy is buoyant and forgiving.  Her outlook on her adoption, finding her birth family and the fulfilling of her new life is up-lifting.  She sheds a hopeful light on how one can grasp the whole process and build a lasting relationship from what could be the bitter ashes of life.  Kathy is to be admired.  I appreciated her optimism and openness.  Her unconditional love is heartening.

This is a story of love and redemption in the face of some nearly insurmountable odds.  Julie, in particular, faced the cold upbringing of a child passed from links of inconsistent parental love.  It's a wonder she has the well of love she has to draw from given that background! 

I highly recommend this book to readers of all genre.  You'll enjoy the writing style.  It's a fast read because it flows so well.  It's absorbing.  The story may appear to be ordinary in the hearing, but it's extraordinary in the reading.

5 stars                                  Deborah/TheBookishDame

"Charles Dickens In Love" by Robert Garnett ~ New Biography

 

SUMMARY :

 

When Charles Dickens died in 1870 he was the best-known man in the English-speaking world—the pre-eminent Victorian celebrity, universally mourned as both a noble spirit and the greatest of novelists. Yet when the first person named in his will turned out to be an unknown woman named Ellen Ternan, only a handful of people had any idea who she was, and her conspicuous presence in his will was a mystery. Of his romance with Ellen, Dickens had written, “it belongs to my life and probably will only die out of the same with the proprietor,” and so it was—until his death she remained the most important person in his life.

She was not the first woman who had fired his imagination. As a young man he had fallen deeply in love with a woman who “pervaded every chink and crevice” of his mind for three years, Maria Beadnell,
and when she eventually jilted him he vowed that “I never can love any human creature breathing but yourself.” A few years later he was stunned by the sudden death of his young sister-in-law, Mary Scott Hogarth, and worshiped her memory for the rest of his life. “I solemnly believe that so perfect a creature never breathed,” he declared, and when he died over thirty years later he was still wearing her ring.

Charles Dickens has no rival as the most fertile creative imagination since William Shakespeare, and no one influenced his imagination more powerfully than these three women, his muses and teachers in the school of love. Using hundreds of primary sources, Charles Dickens in Love narrates the story of the most intense romances of Dickens’s life, and shows how his novels both testify to his own strongest affections and serve as memorials to the young women he loved all too well, if not always wisely.

PARTICULARS OF THE BOOK :
Published by:  Pegasus
Pages:  256
Genre:  Non-Fiction/Biography
Purchase:  Barnes & Noble


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Robert Garnett is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia
(Ph.D.), and currently Professor of English at Gettysburg College. He has been researching Dickens for over a dozen years, has presented papers on him at many academic conferences, and has published articles on his life and novels in scholarly journals such as Dickens Quarterly and Dickens Studies Annual.


THE BOOKISH DAME REVIEWS :

This is an all together very readable biographical study and chronicle about the love life of Charles Dickens.  It's comprehensive but not at all massive, doable and enjoyable to read.  I found it quite "user friendly," surprisingly enough.  A good read and an informative one.

Robert Garnett describes the main three loves of Dickens's life and their affects on him and his individual works, as well as his writings in total.  I felt many parts of the book were redundant, however, although not tiring to read. I wondered whether the book actually came from his teaching notes at times. But, basically, there are intimate sections that enhance the chapters on each of Dickens  muses/loved ones.  And, his relationships with famous writers of the times such as Wilke Collins, brought an added dimension I enjoyed reading about.

While I did not find it an extremely academic book, I was refreshed and relieved by that fact to an extent.  It is a book I can recommend to those who love Charles Dickens and would like to know more about this softer side of him and how his love of particular women, the central focus of his novels, came about.

A book I would recommend to Dickens lovers with the above reservations.

3.5 stars              Deborah/TheBookishDame



 

"Felice's Worlds: From the Holocaust to the Halls of Modern Art" by Henry Massie

Summary: 

FIRST SHE ESCAPED THE HOLOCAUST AND THE POVERTY OF THE SHTETL. AFTER THAT, SHE MOVED IN MANY WORLDS. AND IN EVERY ONE SHE MADE HER MARK.

Felice Massie was a student in France, caught up in the horrors of Naziism when she was 20 years old.  Cut off by the war from her family living in a small village in Poland, she shifted from one country to another attempting to find a home for herself and a means to rescue her parents, brother and sister.  As the Holocaust descended on her shtetl, she arrived penniless in America.  Over time she raised a family and amassed one of foremost collections of American modern art.  Her boldness and resilience became a beacon of hope and inspiration for others.

Remarks:   

"Henry Massie never blinks as he creates an astonishing chronicle of a life in diaspora. Only a son could capture this passionate spirit, who escaped both Adolf Hitler and Joe McCarthy." --Patty Friedmann, author of TOO JEWISH

“Henry Massie's FELICE'S WORLDS is a labor of love in more ways than one.  A daughter of the 20th century, Felice Massie's journey is both a personal odyssey and a window on some of the most important events in political history and the modern art world.  It's also the story of a remarkable woman who was ahead of her time in many notable ways.  Although there are heartbreaks along the way, Massie also captures his mother's sense of humor and most of all, her remarkable coming of age in Europe, Palestine and America.  This is a book you'll want to share with your friends and gift to everyone who appreciates the skills of a wonderful writing talent.  Don't miss it.” --

            Roger Rapoport, author of Hillsdale: A Greek Tragedy in America's Heartland, and journalist,   The Frequent Flyer.

Particulars of the Book : 

Genre: Biography/Memoir/Historical (Holocaust)

Publisher: booksBnimble

Publication Date: Feb, 2012

Pages:  211

Link to purchase the book on Amazon (or where it is sold):  http://www.amazon.com/Felices-Worlds-Holocaust-Modern-ebook/dp/B0079Q0HU6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1329434260&sr=1-1

 About the Author :        Henry Massie

Henry Massie is a psychiatrist, award-winning author, and pioneering researcher in the field of autism. FELICE'S WORLDS--From the Holocaust to the Halls of Modern Art, is the a memoir and biography of his mother, a brilliant and beautiful woman who participated in many of the most critical periods of the 20th Century.

Learn more about him here:

Email Address: booksbnimble@gmail.com

Website Address: www.booksbnimble.com

Twitter Address: @booksbnimble

Facebook Address: /booksbnimble

 

An Interview with Dr. Massie :

1)  First of all, please tell us a special something about what makes you "tick."  When you aren't writing, what are you doing.

When I'm not solving my fictional characters' problems or recreating real people's lives on paper, I'm in my office consulting with patients, trying to help them solve problems in real life.  I'm a psychiatrist.  And when doing none of the above, I may be walking with my dog on Goat Rock beach in northern California.

 2)  You chose a specific genre, a place and time to write about, what made you choose it?

The genre chose me.  Felice's Worlds is a biography of my mother, in a sense her memoir.  It is often in the very words she used to tell me about her life and adventures during some of the critical periods of the 20^th century.  It is also a double-memoir about how her brilliance, boldness and emotional burdens affected me.  Her story was dying to be told.

Currently I am working in the very different genre of a highly fictionalized account of how somebody I knew was influenced by his friendship with Marilyn Monroe when he was in high-school and she was in her thirties, in the two years before her death.  It is called Prom Date.  I fell into writing it because of my fascination with people's desires and dreams and how they turn out.

3)  Please share with your readers where you like to write. Do you have a particular space or desk?  What can you see from your desk?  Do you have props you use to write from?  What about special "charms?"

I have three desks:  one in my office where I keep charts and so forth, one in a study in my house in Berkeley where I pay bills, and one at my cabin near Guerneville, California, near where the Russian River flows into the Pacific Ocean.  The desk at the cabin is where I do my writing.  I need to escape from the city desks to the cabin to be creative.  "Living on the river," as people say, is to live in another world that fosters fantasies.  From my desk there I see three redwood trees reaching to the sky, climbing so high that I can't even see their tops if I put my face to the window and peer up.  My desk is completely cluttered with paper, clippings, and notes to myself.  My two desks back in town are neat and orderly.  The trees outside my window are my writing totems.

4)  In your opinion, what makes a book a great one?

A great book has to suck me into it like a whirlpool.  After a spell of reading, the characters and their dilemmas in a great book make me feel so tense that I need to put the book down and get some breathing space.  The language and imagery has to be alive and poetic.  I don't think books that obsess over little details and tiny shades of meaning and feeling are great (I call them dandelion cottage books) even though many critics adore them. 

5)  Which author(s) most influenced your love of books from childhood?

Starting in about fourth grade I read every Hardy Boy adventure that came out.  They still influence my writing.  In sixth grade I switched to a series of books about American history for young people.  They taught me about real people and events.  My interest in character developed in high school when I started reading Faulkner.  My favorite was his novella The Bear.

7)  Please share with us the underlying message of your book.  What would you like your readers to take away after having read the book?

There are several themes running through Felice's Worlds:  1) War endures through millennia in the land called Palestine and Israel because of the never-ending folly of men with guns, 2) Those who suffered the Holocaust have passed their psychological trauma from one generation to the next and the next, 3) Traumatized though they may be, some people show amazing emotional resilience, 4) Beauty may save the soul, but only so far.

I'm content if readers understand these things better after reading Felice's Worlds.

8)  Were you able to keep your original title?  What was it, if not?

The title of Felice's Worlds was fluid, a shifting about work in progress as long as the book was a work in progress.  It didn't crystallize until the book was finished, with help from the publisher.

9)  Is there a song or music in general that might best represent your book as a theme song. 

Yes, Eastern European klezmer music captures the book.  The publisher, BooksBnimble, created a video trailer for Felice's Worlds, with an excerpt of Felice speaking about her past when she was in her seventies, and with pictures of her village on the Polish-Russian border, and her home and art in America.  The trailer's klezmer music has snippets of jazz from the 1930s, gypsy rhythms, and Jewish folk melodies. You can access the trailer by going to YouTube, or via the publisher's website, or via the Amazon listing for the book, I believe.

10)  If you could write your book again, what would you change?

Felice's Worlds went through three or four drafts, with input from friends and two editors.  For the final draft I told myself this time I want to get it right, leave nothing I'm dissatisfied with on the page, say what I want to say, and say it cleanly once a for all.  I'm satisfied with what's there.

11)   What was the worst distraction you had to fight through while writing your book? 

Working on the book was riveting.  It could eat me up, gobble up all my time.  I needed to fight myself away from it by looking for distractions.

12)  What did you feel or think when you held the first copy of your book in your hands?

I felt that I had done justice to Felice's life.

13)  Tell us a secret about your book we wouldn't otherwise know, please!

Felice had a saying:  Truth is better than fiction because it is more unbelievable.  Perhaps she invented some of her truths.   

 

I appreciate so much your taking time for this interview, Hank.  Thank you for being so candid!

 

 

Dr. Massie Discusses Feminism and "Felice" :

 

One of my areas of particular interest is feminism in writing and life.  I'm delighted to bring this guest post by Dr. Massie on the subject!

 

 

 

“How my mother influenced my perspective on women and feminism.” 

My mother was my first teacher, not unusual of course, but she was an unusually dramatic one, so I learned from her that women could have many strong emotions, be well educated, and have strong opinions.  They didn't have to be like many other mothers in my parents' circle, playing bridge for long, silent hours at a country club.  I also learned from my mother that women didn't have to be like the low-key Midwestern men around me who worked endless hours a day and rarely showed any feelings.

 

 My father commissioned a portrait of my mother just after they married, "So I will have something to remember you by if I lose you," he said.  It captured her at her most beautiful, and my mother hung it over her bed for the rest of her life.  I slowly understood how important it was for her to always know how alluring she was in her youth, and how terribly important it was for her to feel loved and lovable.  I imagine those feelings are important to most women.  I could see that my mother knew how to flirt, to touch a man gently on the shoulder, and how to offer her cigarette to be lit.  She said to me toward the end of her life, 'If I had girls I would have raised them to have feminine interests and femininity.  It is important for a girl to make herself as attractive as possible. Girls are created, are genetically endowed to look pretty, and a normal girl should be raised to make herself as attractive as possible with her endowment.  Beauty is its own essence and very agreeable in life.  It is the pleasure of living.  It is necessary to cultivate beauty, not just of the body but of the mind."

 

Perhaps this doesn't sound like Felice had an ounce of activist Feminism in her, but when she was lecturing on modern art at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, young women flocked to her.  She advised them on their love-life and mentored them in their education.  She never spoke of the Feminist movement, however one of her college students saidheight of feminism in the 1970s, "She was the quintessential modern woman.  That short hair [like Audrey Hepburn's], those clothes [colorful folkloric during the day, black skirt to the knee with a black top in the evening], that lovely petite body with the big brown eyes.  She was alive, forceful, independent and challenging." 

              

Since I respected Felice, in turn I respected her own brand of feminism which she exuded just by the way she was.  I had the unusual experience for a son growing up in those days of being mentored in my own education by her.  Other sons were mentored by a father, uncle, professor, or coach.  My mother directed me to countless books which we discussed together over the years.  In my mind womanhood became linked not just with femininity but also with erudition.  Unfortunately her erudition didn't extend to the kitchen for she never learned to cook beyond scrambling eggs, broiling a steak, and fixing a salad.  Nonetheless, my father, brother and I still admired her.  She was not just my first teacher but the best teacher I ever had.  

 

The Dame's Review :

 

This is a rather long review of "Felice's Worlds:  From the Holocaust to the Halls of Modern Art," but I thought the book was especially fascinating and I wanted to bring as many elements of it as I could to my readers.

 

What I found intriguing about this biography were two things in particular:  1)  it often read like a novel, and 2)  it was the most clear expose' on the Holocaust and European history that I'd read outside of text books.  Finally, this book answered a question I'd wondered about when I worked as an interior designer for so many years; that is, why did so many of my Jewish women clients choose contemporary designs and art for their homes?  What drew them to contemporary styles even in their dress, for the most part?  It was so apparent to me, I wanted an answer...

 

Henry Massie is a very strong writer, of that there can be no question.  His skill at keeping the story flowing and within an interesting and understandable context is compelling.  But his strongest area of expertise was evident in his understanding of European cultural relationships, WWII history as it affected Jews in Europe, and in the beauty of architecture and culture of these countries historically.  Reading these sections of his book was mesmerizing.  Along with the story of his mother in detail, we learn the circumstances of her world as it shattered like crystal around her.  It made for a rare and unforgettable read.

 

Felice comes through as an indomitable spirit.  She is brave above all things.  Beautiful and stalwart, she faces tragedy, hunger, homelessness and loneliness like a champion.  I often wondered as I read the book, if it could have been as easy as it seemed for her to transist from one extreme hardship to another.  I was struck by her life culled from education as an anchor in a stream in which she was initially left abandoned by a mother who was disconnected from her.  Intellectual pursuits and artistic understanding became a lifeline for her, her entire life.

 

The point I want to make here about design, art and contemporary culture which Hank Massie personifies in his mother comes about as he describes her culmination and "soothing of her survival guilt" through the adaptation of the philosophy and spirituality of beauty and aesthetics.  I loosely quote here some of the thoughts/sayings that he uses in reference to Felice:

 

   "..needed something new.  The war had annihilated everything--European Jewish culture,  what we believed in, society's values...  There's no nostalgia in abstract expressionist art because it had never existed before."  Felice

 

   "...new for a new life...a cleansing purity in the new art after the meanness and horrors of WWII."

 

   "Beauty will save the world," she thought.

 

   "The art took them away from the realities of the world...to a place where beauty reigned and where evil was overcome by its radiance."

 

   "Beauty could be like the antidote to the horrors and feelings of the Holocaust."

 

 

I think this answers many of my personal questions I've had about the aesthetic of contemporary design and art for the Jewish families I know and love.  When a past has been wiped out, and family memories are too painful, looking forward may be one of the only joys to cultivate and surround oneself with.

 

While I didn't think "Felice's Worlds" was a perfect book; it often made Felice out to be saintly in her perfection, beauty and intelligence,  I thought it was altogether a wonderful experience of a read.  It was a biography that certainly lifted the veil on Holocaust survival from the perspective of not just one, but several generations, including Henry Massie's own life.

 

I would recommend this book particularly for those interested in this time in history, and in survivors of the Holocaust, as well as the history of expressionist art.  A beautiful book.

 

5 stars                Deborah/TheBookishDame

 

May The Mail Be Ever In Your Favor! As It Was In Mine This Past 2 Weeks :]

In the last two weeks, the Spring breezes have been in my favor, and my postman has been lugging boxes to my door!

I'm so thrilled and banked with books!! 

This, however, may mean I won't be up for air for a while. :P

Stash One, above....

This is my second haul....so psyched!

Mixtures here of things I've received and ferreted out, and purchased on my own.

I am so happy to have received a wonderful bunch of new ARCs from Bloomsbury:  Can't wait to read these!

The Sweetness of Salt         by Cecilia Galante

Little Women and Me         by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Dead Reckoning                  by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill

Something Like Normal    by Trish Doller

Violins of Autumn               by Amy McAulay

The Unquiet                         by Jeannine  Garsee

Ripper        by Amy Carol Reeves     *Been looking forward to reading this one for a long time!

The 500     by Matthew Quirk           *ARC from Regan Arthur ~ Great DC thriller!

The Girl Who Couldn't Say No          *Review request from author psychiatrist Jack V. Hattem

2nd stash:

Roanoke                           by  Margaret Lawrence       *purchased at Library sale

The Devil's Queen                                                           *purchased at Library sale

The Weird Sisters                      *Barnes & Noble buy

Jane Vows Vengence (Austen mash up!)   *Barnes & Noble gift certif. buy

Revived    by  Cat Patrick    *Little, Brown & Co., ARC

The Drowned Cities  by  Paolo Bacigalupi   *Little, Brown & Co., ARC

Alpha    by  Greg Rucka    *Mulholland Books, ARC

Guilt by Degrees  by  Marcia Clark   *Mulholland Books, ARC

Pure    by  Juliana Baggott     *Requested for review! YA

The Innocents      by  Francesca Segal   *ARC for review

Last Will                 by  Lisa Marklund         *Requested for review ~Scandanavian thriller writer!

Fatal Induction     by  Bernadette Pajer     *Poisoned Pen  ARC

I Hunt Killers         by  Barry Lyga               *Review request

While I'm At It:  Netgalley Reads~

The Last Romanov

Love Fiercely

Slide

Sophie and the Rising Sun Enchantments

Replication

Unruly Passions

Dying to Know You

So, now you know all the bookish secrets I'm harboring...or do you?

Deborah/TheBookishDame    (Then again, what's a dame without her secrets? :]  )

"Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life" by Natalie Dykstra~The Shattering Of A Brilliant Woman

Known for her quick wit, being widely read and having an envied grasp of literature and art, the independently-minded and gracious photographic artist Clover Adams took her life in 1885.  This is her story.

Published by:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Pages:  330

Genre:  Biography/Non-fiction

Find out more:  http://nataliedykstra.com/

Cover Rating:

This gorgeous cover which seems a take on a painting by John Singer Sargeant depicts the elegant lady of leisure of the late 1800's, just the time of Clover Adams.  Her near smile gives us the story in a nutshell...she's not exactly smiling, but she's not sour, either.  We're left to project what we will on her face.  I love this cover in all its fine details.  Perfect for drawing those who will most likely read it, women.  Rated:  A

Some Reviews :

“Natalie Dykstra writes of Clover Adams’s striking photographs that they ‘defeat distances between people and make time stand still.’ Dykstra’s biography achieves the same remarkable feat, bringing us close to an inspiring if ultimately tragic life, a celebrated marriage gone awry, a vanished world of privilege where the universally costly emotions of love, loss, and envy nevertheless hold sway. ‘I spare you the inside view of my heart,’ Clover Adams once wrote to her beloved father. Natalie Dykstra spares nothing in this eloquent and powerfully sympathetic portrait of the artist as a lady, a haunting hymn to women’s ways of seeing.” — Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters

“What happened to Clover Adams broke Henry Adams’s heart. And in Natalie Dykstra’s splendid retelling, it will break yours. This is a moving book, deeply researched, fast-paced, and profoundly engaging. It is not easy to write a book the family for so long did not want written. Dykstra has succeeded in doing so, and she has returned Clover Adams to us as a living figure.” — Robert D. Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“At last, Clover Adams has the biography she deserves. Long glimpsed only as the wife of a famous man or the dazzling hostess to Gilded Age luminaries, she emerges here as a complex and fascinating woman — a thinker, writer, and photographer, but also a deeply troubled soul. Natalie Dykstra follows her subject from the academic circles of mid-nineteenth-century Boston to the halls of power in Washington, D.C., giving us a broader portrait of late-nineteenth-century life. But she never loses her focus on Clover and the dark demons that haunted her throughout her life. This is a compelling read, so beautifully written and persuasively argued it’s hard to put down.” — Martha A. Sandweiss, author of Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

Author Natalie Dykstra has received a

National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for her work on Clover Adams. She is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI.

The Dame's Review :

The only picture of Clover Adams.  When she died, her husband, Henry Adams destroyed all of her photographs in their home and all of her letters.  There were no other known pictures of her than this one.  No close ups.

Nearly 20 years ago I read a novel based on truth (which name I can't remember now) about Clover Adams, her unhappy marriage to Henry Adams, her life and death.  I have never been able to forget it.  Not because the novel was so wonderful, although it was well written, but because the story was so haunting.  In this biography by Natalie Dykstra I was struck with that same feeling of a shattered mirror...a life so beautiful, a woman so gifted and admired who found herself broken like delicate glass fallen from a shelf.  It's instance is like the flash of a camera's bulb.  Yet, it seems to linger on in my mind like an after image.  I can't get the life of Clover Adams out of my mind.  In this biography "Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life"  more of the puzzle of her life came together for me.  This is a book I expect to return to several times over the years.

It is no surprise that a child of a mother who was herself abandoned at a young age by a morbidly depressed mother, should have some residual of that original trauma.  Family heartache and major losses seem to leave lasting scars that mar the DNA.  Clover herself was just a 5 year old when her mother died.  She was nothing if not a child and  young woman hampered by a delicate mind and heart.  In fact, the Hooper family was fraught with death and depression to suicide.

Brought up with the expectations of a Boston Brahmin, Transcendentalist family whose standard was undoubtedly putting a brave and beautiful face on all things, must have been nearly more than Clover could bear as she grew up and married. No surprise that she became a scholar and brilliant conversationalist.  How else could she escape the emotional landscape she must  have found herself in?  How else could she create a "lovable" self and an image of what a woman was supposed to be except to excel at all things? How could she fail to be emotionally stalwart, yet "eccentric?"  How fragile her life must have been when the love she so desperately needed fell just out of her reach, ultimately.

Natalie Dykstra takes us on a personal journey with Clover Adams as she walks this thin line of child to womanhood.  We learn of her development, her education, her family and her friends.  We see her through the eyes of others who knew and loved her, and we ultimately see her through her own eyes by way of her photo lens. 

There is so much that could be said about this book and Mrs. Adams, but as an artist, I want to share with you my focus on Clover's art work; her photography, and what I saw there for myself.  If you will go to Ms Dykstra's website, it will lead you to a link with the Massachusetts Historical Society which has a collection of Clover's photographs.  These pictures are discussed in Dykstra's book.   I want to discuss her photography with you because I think it gives us insight into her better than any words can. 

What I see is this:  a disconnect between people, an isolation in subjects and their surroundings, an assortment of unrelated and strangely juxtaposed natural settings with human beings or animals, depressed and mournful women, distant faces and grim faced family members, trees stark and strikingly lonely and barren in their setting.  In her collection of works, only the few pictures of very young children give some levity to her portraits; a little girl on a metal riding horse, and two children beside a tree.  

For the most part Clover Adam's photographs are not pretty pictures.  There are mostly portrait sorts of pictures, and even given the mode of the times to remain sober without smiling, these pictures still have the odd body language and physical placements that create a more off-centered and disconnected feel.  Psychologically, they scream for help.  In one picture, three women of different ages are on a rock.  Two older women are faced completely away from the camera and are dressed in heavy black. They stand on or sit on rocks just over a third young girl who is dressed in a light white dress, sitting on a rock below them and facing the camera with a smile on her face. This is no ordinary three family members portrait on a  hillside. It seems to depict death overlooking life; or the different ages of women.  But, when it's studied more, the disconnect comes stronger with the placement of the women's backs to the camera.  There's another message here altogether...a deeper meaning going on.  Perhaps it's the hopefulness of a young girl's mind and the virginity of her spirit vs the reality/awareness of the truth of her existence?  I'm not sure.  It could be many things in Clover's mind.  Either way, it shows a brittleness of heart from the eye of the camera...from the one who set up the composition and made the effort to bring the process through to a photograph.

Although the majority of her photographs convey this feeling of disconnect and isolation, I found it also beautiful to see how Clover set many of her "stages" and compositions.  In the portraits of women, their surroundings were open-aired, at least.  I liked this idea, as if she were breathing a freedom and release into their worlds.  There is a particularly striking photograph of an elderly woman sitting on a porch just outside of an open door.  She's in a dark dress all buttoned up, white cap on, stitching something small in her hands.  There's a small dog at her feet.  And there's the image of a lovely art panelled screen just inside the door behind her.  The shadows are beautiful in this photo, but what struck me most is this vision of freedom.  There's the sense that the woman is escaping the confines not only of the house, but also of her age...she's sitting like a girl on the floor of the porch!  And behind her, slightly hidden in the half dark hallway is a screen with artwork on it.  It hints at something exotic, another story.  Like another life, a more exciting life that may have been left behind or concealed in this woman's life in the past.  It's a beautiful photograph.  If it's a projection of what Clover feels "might have been" or if it's a message of what this woman has lost in life, it's a very telling piece of work coming from her camera to us. 

Natalie Dykstra has done much justice to the life and work of Clover Adams.  This is a beautiful book about a fleeting and lavishly imagined life.  As in any story of a young woman of promise who takes her own life, this one is shocking and harshly jarring.  We seem to know her somehow.  And in that "knowing" it's difficult to let her go so easily.  No matter how many books are written about Clover Adams, I will always wish I knew what made her decide to drink that horrible vial of poison...why she chose to end her life as if trashed upon the wasteland of her artwork.  I will never quite be able to forgive Henry Adams for his harshness and cruelties to her, for disallowing her to shine, and for dismissing her so quickly from his mouth and memoirs.

This is a very readable and extensive work by Ms Dykstra.  She's a capable and learned biographer who has treated the life and heart of Clover Adams with delicacy and honor.  I loved this book and highly recommend it.  Without regard to Henry Adams, although he does play a major part in Clover's life, obviously, I think it's a strong slice of American history from a woman's perspective.  And I think it's a great tribute to the heart of women during an age of repression.

5 stars

Deborah/TheBookishDame