Reading About Ladies

I’m on a bit of a kick reading about ladies recently. I haven’t finished any of these three but read some in each one, then set it aside, pick up another, and read it for awhile. They represent a memoir, a biography, and an autobiography.

The memoir, EDUCATED, relates the author’s personal story of being raised in a home where the father would not enroll his children in public schools for fear of them being indoctrinated. Their mother could teach them only a little. Tara Westover began learning life lessons painfully about how to cope in society. She succeeded in getting an education in spite of it all and attended both Harvard and Cambridge University where she earned a Ph. D. in history. She still struggles with psychological wounds, but one thing - she certainly learned how to write.

Michelle Obama’s autobiography BECOMING shows that she knows how to write well, too. So often books like these two often use the expertise of a professional writer helping them write, but not these two. Mrs. Obama was born into a working class family who lived in crowded conditions in a two bedroom apartment in Chicago. Even with her humble beginnings she rose to graduate from Princeton University and followed with a law degree from Harvard Law School. We all know she became a gracious First Lady who outlines her life well in this volume.

The biography A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE closely details the life of a lady spy in WWII. The spy - Virginia Hall - did not seem the spy type what with her being a female, wearing a prosthetic leg due to a teenage hunting accident, and having the persona of a working journalist reporting for American newspapers. Her handlers in England could hardly believe the success she was having establishing networks of resistance in France, blowing bridges, furnishing itching powder to prostitutes to sprinkle in Nazi uniforms. Whether or not she survived, I haven’t discovered yet.