Southern
ScribeSouthern
Scribe
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Memoir Review |
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At
first, I was concerned that this 300 page book would be a cumbersome read.
In a tribute to Foster’s ability not only to spin a tale, but her poetic
writing, one does not so much turn pages as pass through the days and
years of her family’s life. In
an attempt to tell the story of her own life, Patricia Foster quickly
discovers that her story does not begin in the 1950’s in Linville,
Alabama, but in 1903 in Pickney, Alabama... All
The Lost Girls tells the story of all women, not only Southern white
ones. She speaks of the disappointment, embarrassment, sorrow, and
desperation that poverty brings. From
her grandmother’s marriage to a lady’s man, her mother’s escape from
a mining town, Foster relates her own attempts to escape. It is through
the telling of her mother’s hardships and disappointment, and subsequent
vulnerability that she is able to see exactly what she is trying to
escape. Who is she trying to please? What wrong is she trying to right?
How the mystery of how wrongs of the past perpetrated on her mother and
her grandmother have dominated her life is slowly unraveled. Foster’s
words resound the way song lyrics sing. The book reads smoothly. Foster
carefully dances through time and place. Taking us strolling in and out of
her life, her mother’s and her grandmothers. All are inexorably linked.
She speaks in all three’s voice. She captures the emotions so precisely
is as if she no longer speaks for them ,but becomes these women. She no
longer imagines their pain, but is actually feeling their pain. Her
portrayal of their emotions and thoughts is uncanny. All the Lost Girls does not simply retell the tales of her family, but brings the days, dreams, tears and hopes of her family’s past into stunning clarity. Her writing wrings a poetry from the mundane red soil of the Alabama hills that her mother dreamed of leaving. Even the tears cried and uncried slowly break the reader’s heart. She calls across ages, races, and borders from the realization that one female is irrelevant, sexual abuse to loveless marriages and a lifetime’s search for self.
© 2001 Southern Scribe, All Rights Reserved |
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