Summary:

Laurie lives with her mother, stepfather, and two stepsiblings. Her stepfather is often gone on business trips. When he's home, he's generally kind, but oblivious to the fact that Laurie's mother abuses her. She's kept this secret ever since her birth father left when she was three.

When her mother gets angry she takes it out on Laurie, beating her and confining her. In front of other people they both pretend it didn't happen, and they never talk about it. Her mother explains her bruises and scars and frequent trips to the emergency room as a result of Laurie's clumsiness. She has moved frequently, and keeps Laurie from developing friendships.

But Laurie does find friends, first in a new next-door neighbor, a boy with a hospital record of his own who walks on crutches, and then in her stepbrother, who begins to realize what's happening and conspires with her to get help. Eventually she is released from the cycle of abuse when her mother is hurt in an accident and the three children seek refuge with the stepsibling's grandmother. Laurie's stepfather apologizes for his inattention and promises her the safety of the grandmother's home for the summer and their home again when her mother has had treatment for her abusive behavior.

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The Hours begins with a reconstruction of Virginia Woolf's 1941 suicide by drowning. What follows is an exploration of despair and tenacity, of the reasons that some people choose not to continue living, and of the things that enable others to go on. Patterned as a kind of theme and variations on Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, this novel has three strands, each tracing a day in the life of a woman: Virginia Woolf herself, in 1925, as she begins to write Mrs. Dalloway; a middle-aged 1990s New Yorker named Clarissa Vaughan, but nicknamed "Mrs. Dalloway" by Richard, her ex-lover, an acclaimed writer who is dying of AIDS; and Laura Brown, a young mother in Los Angeles in 1949, pregnant, depressed, and reading Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Laura's small son, Ritchie, we gradually realize, has grown up to become the Richard in Clarissa Vaughan's story and, as the hours pass in the day-long story of each woman, patterns intertwine. Clarissa (living as a lesbian, so following a path that Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was offered but chose not to take) is planning a party for Richard. Laura is preparing a birthday dinner for her husband but after a visit from the woman next door, whom she kisses in a moment of profound but disruptive empathy, she checks into a hotel room to read, and to consider suicide. Woolf, recognizing the deep connection between her mental illness and her writing, tries to flee from the faintly suffocating safety of her home and husband.

Each woman survives, and all three days end with a sense of qualified and temporary happiness, drawn together, I think, by the fictional Virginia Woolf's decision about her novel: throughout the day she has thought about her main character, and has intended the book to end with her suicide. Late in the evening, having returned home, Woolf decides to let Mrs. Dalloway live: "sane Clarissa--exultant, ordinary Clarissa--will go on, . . . loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die."

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The Shawl is comprised of two stories, "The Shawl" and "Rosa," originally published in The New Yorker respectively in 1980 and 1983. The first and much shorter of the stories is an extremely powerful account of the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps. Rosa, (who we meet again 30 years later in the second story), has been hiding and protecting her daughter Magda in a shawl. Rosa's 14 year old niece, Stella, (who also is central to the second story) takes the shawl from the child for her own comfort. The horrific events that follow, tiny Magda's search for her shawl and discovery by a German soldier who hurtles her to her death against an electrified fence, shape the remainder of Rosa's life--and this book.

In the sequel, Rosa, now 59 years old, has moved to Miami (a "hellish place") after literally destroying the junk shop in New York which she had owned. She lives an isolated life in a dilapidated one room apartment. Stella, who remained in New York, supports her financially, and is her primary source of contact with the outside world. A serendipitous meeting at a laundromat with a Mr. Persky, however, changes Rosa's life.

This is not to imply that there is a romanticized ending to this story--just a glimmer of hope of reconnection to the world is offered. For Rosa was still living the holocaust. As she put it--there's life before, life during (Hitler's reign) and life after--"Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays." This orientation to the world is what Persky challenges.

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Summary:

This psychobiographical reading of Katherine Mansfield's stories links the fiction to particular traumas in Mansfield's life and speculates about the various motives at work in her use of personal pain as material for fiction. Each of seven chapters is focused upon a key event in Mansfield's life, including, for instance, the death of her younger sister, maternal rejection, venereal disease, and abortion.

Burgan draws widely upon psychological theory, including allusions to Freud, Breuer, Erikson, Horney and others. She also comments on Mansfield's own extensive writing about her own fiction including material from letters and journals that vex the question of how, whether, and to what extent to read the stories in light of the biographical backdrop.

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Megan was one of the best players on her school basketball team until she accepted a ride home on the back of a motorcycle that slid on gravelly surface, overturned, and left her with a spinal cord injury. Now, a few months later, in a wheelchair, with no sensation in her feet or legs, she is packed up with all her equipment to spend the summer with the family on the island where they've always vacationed.

At first she can hardly bear being confined to watching from windows or negotiating makeshift ramps where she once ran so freely in woods and rowed so happily on the lake. When a boy appears from the neighboring cabin and tries to make friends she resists at first, but is finally drawn into a friendship that gives her the courage to "pick up the pieces" of her broken life and try new ways of being active, including, at the end of the summer, a wheelchair race on the mainland.

She also finds herself befriending the boy's grandmother, an aging actress turning alcoholic because she can't come to terms with aging and the loss of romantic leads in film. As Megan learns to come to terms with her own limitations, she is able indirectly to help the older woman come to terms with her own sense of loss.

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Summary:

In 1978, seventeen-year-old Rosemary Mahoney spent her summer as housekeeper for author Lillian Hellman. A great admirer of Hellman's life and writing, Mahoney had applied directly to Hellman for the job, and could hardly believe her good luck in being hired. By the end of her first week of work, however, her mother had to talk her into staying.

Hellman, in her early seventies, was demanding, exacting, infuriating--and frail, nearly blind, forgetful, and lame. As Mahoney tells Hellman's story, she also tells her own, the daughter of a physician father who committed suicide when Mahoney was a child and a schoolteacher mother who was crippled by polio and is an alcoholic.

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Summary:

Izzy, a popular, active cheerleader, happily accepts a date with an attractive senior she doesn't know well, flattered to be noticed by him. At the party her date drinks too much, insists on driving her home anyway, and smashes the car into a tree. Marco suffers only surface wounds, but Izzy's leg is crushed and has to be amputated just below the knee.

During her weeks in the hospital Izzy finds that not only is her whole physical orientation to the world required to change--she suddenly sees every path in terms of obstacles--but her relationship to family and friends changes, too. Her three closest friends begin to avoid her, uncertain what to say or how to include her in their plans. In the meantime Rosamunde, a marginal classmate whose slightly unkempt appearance and quirky behavior makes her entertaining, but excludes her from the "in" crowd, moves into Izzy's world with curiosity, frankness, inventive amusements and a steady, if offbeat compassion.

In her impassive and demanding African American physical therapist Izzy discovers another unexpected source of comfort on terms she doesn't at first recognize as kind. As the story ends, Izzy is back at school, finding her way into a new, more challenging relationship to her body and her peers, and a friendship with Rosamunde unlike any she's known before.

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Summary:

The Changes is set in the deep South during the depression. A fifteen year old girl, whose main ambition is to finish school and go to college, witnesses her mother’s intentional starvation. The family attributes their mother’s irrational behavior to menopause, believing that all women going through "the change" become crazy.

The young daughter not only fears that her mother’s insanity is hereditary, but also that it may be partly her fault. The reader suspects that the mother may have intended to die in order that her daughter could afford to go school. The family seems to feel that the daughter’s presence in the household somehow drove her mother to insanity.

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Summary:

Fanny Gideon is having a tree house built just like the one she remembered from her childhood. The best times of her life were spent in that tree house and she hopes to recapture the clarity, joy, and freedom of her youth. The problem is that Fanny Gideon is 78 years old and has Alzheimer's disease.

She struggles on a daily basis with trying to fit into a life that she does not like, and with constraints that diminish her sense of herself. Her daughter is thinking about placing her in a nursing home. Mrs. Gideon almost burns down the house on a daily basis. The cleaning lady follows her around when her daughter is out of the house.

This story is about how an elderly woman and her now elderly childhood sweetheart attempt to recapture both their youth and their current lives against all odds. It is about preservation of the self despite memory loss, renewal of love in old age, and about rebellion.

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Summary:

Doctor Marigold, named for the man who delivered him, is a "cheap-jack" who hawks sundries from a traveling cart he inhabits with his wife and his daughter Sophy. The mother beats Sophy, but Marigold, feeling powerless, does nothing to stop her. When the child dies of a fever, her guilt-wracked mother commits suicide.

Doctor Marigold's lonely fortunes reverse when he adopts a deaf and mute girl whose mother is dead and whose stepfather, owner of a traveling circus, beats her. Marigold acquires the child for three pair of braces (suspenders), names her Sophy, invents his own system of sign language to teach her to read and converse with him, and finally sends her to a "deaf-and-dumb establishment" in London to complete her education.

When Sophy falls in love with another student, her father encourages her marriage, while feeling it as a terrible loss. Sophy writes him of her baby's birth and of her fear that the child will be deaf. The story culminates in Sophy's return and Doctor Marigold's realization that his granddaughter can hear.

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