Summary:

In the "free love" context of the nineteen-sixties, Harriet and David Lovatt are throwbacks to a more conservative, traditional, and family-oriented decade. Their life dream is to have a big house in the country filled with children, and it seems that they will succeed. After bearing four young children, however, Harriet is feeling the strain of years of childbearing, sleeplessness, money trouble, and her parents' and in-laws' disapproval of her fecundity.

Her fifth pregnancy is not only unplanned, but also unusually painful and disruptive. Harriet's doctor prescribes sedatives but finds nothing abnormal in her situation. When Ben is born, Harriet jokes that he is like "a troll or a goblin," but no one responds well to this unusually hairy and physically vigorous baby, who in turn does not respond to anything but his own desires and fears.

As he grows older, family pets and other children seem to be in physical danger. Health care professionals do not confirm the couple's conviction that Ben is not normal, but neither do they obstruct the decision to send Ben to a private institution, a removal that leaves the family temporarily happy until Harriet visits Ben and recognizes the institution for what it is, a place where all manner of "different" children are sent to live heavily medicated, physically restrained, and foreshortened lives away from families who do not want them.

Harriet brings Ben home, where he grows up amid what remains of the Lovatts' domestic fantasy, and finds community in a gang of thuggish older boys whom Harriet suspects are involved in various criminal acts. As the story closes, Ben has left home and Harriet imagines him in another country, "searching the faces in the crowd for another of his own kind" (133).

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Summary:

Philip Carey, the central character of this early 20th century Bildungsroman, is both an orphan and afflicted with a club foot. He is sent at age nine, after the death of his mother, to live with a childless uncle--a deeply religious Vicar--and his submissive aunt. They have no idea how to be parents, so send Philip away to a boys' boarding school where the child begins to learn what it means to be less than physically "perfect." The remainder of Philip's development is cast in this light.

He roams about looking for himself and his place--to Germany to learn languages, to London to learn a trade, to Paris to study art, and finally, as a last resort, a default decision to follow in the steps of his father the physician. A major part of Philip's maturation is based in making decisions about women and about sensual love. The most painful portions of his story are those that evolve around his stumbling and frequently failed attempts to find security in his personal relationships.

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Annie, about to finish high school, is still struggling with the long-term grief and confusion that has changed her family life since her sister, Mog, was killed by a car thief just before her own high school graduation two years ago. Annie wants to talk about Mog, but her mother remains in insistent denial and turns away from any mention of her; her father is protective of her mother and keeps his own long silences; and her brother, eager to get on with life, is willing, but unable to sustain much of the kind of conversation that might help.

Mog’s boyfriend, who was with Mog on the night of the shooting and sustained an injury but survived, offers one source of help in Annie’s process of emerging from grief, but the help becomes confused with romantic attentions that eventually, with the help of a therapist, Mog realizes she needs gently to renounce. Her belated decision to see a therapist comes at the suggestion of a friend’s mother who sees how stuck the family is in their evasions of the grief process. She initiates the visits on her own steam, with the approval of her rather passive but supportive father, and with a rather tense policy of noninterference from her mother.

Eventually, as Annie starts college, she finds herself able to move along toward remembering Mog and speaking about her freely while also reclaiming her own life and ambitions without guilt for leaving her sister "behind." Her father assures her that her mother will "be alright." In the meantime, Annie realizes not everyone has to heal the same way, and she has, with help, found a way that works for her.

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The narrator stands working at her ironing board, responding mentally to a request someone (a teacher? a social worker?) makes of her regarding her daughter Emily, "I wish you could manage the time to come in and talk with me . . . She's a youngster who needs help." The woman's thoughts go back to Emily's birth during the Depression when she was only 19, and her thoughts range forward, haltingly, in piecemeal fashion, through her daughter's difficult childhood.

Due to the wages of loss, poverty and dislocation, a wall has grown up between mother and daughter--she has always wanted to love the sickly, awkward, stiff, and isolated girl, but has not been able to penetrate the wall. And then, she recalls, out of nowhere Emily won first prize in her school amateur show. The girl is a natural performer, a wonderful comedienne, who now is in demand throughout the city and state.

Suddenly, Emily appears on the scene. "Aren't you ever going to finish the ironing, mother?" She says that she wants to sleep in the morning, even though this will make her late for mid-term exams. Near the end of the story the narrator imagines telling her interlocutor, "Why were you so concerned? She will find her way." But then she implores, "Only help her to know--help make it so there is cause for her to know--that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."

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Summary:

This novel purports to be the story of Ned Kelly, the most famous of all Australian outlaws, as told in his own words. We learn that after Ned’s capture in the shoot-out at Glenrowan on June 28th, 1880, "thirteen parcels of stained and dog-eared papers, every one of them in Ned Kelly’s distinctive hand" (p. 4), were discovered among his things. These parcels turned out to be a memoir, addressed to the infant daughter whom he was never to see because his wife fled to San Francisco.

Ned was the son of poor Irish immigrants who farmed a "selection" (i.e. homestead) in the northern part of the colony of Victoria. After his father died, in order to help support her children, Ned’s mother took up with a series of dubious men, including an outlaw named Harry Power, who became the boy’s manipulative mentor. The memoir presents Ned as a goodhearted, loyal, and basically honest young man who came to blows with the law partly as a result of his bad companions, and partly through the intrinsic malice of the police.

Along with his brothers and two friends, he reluctantly becomes a bank robber, commits a few incidental murders, and ends up as a popular hero whose final capture has become part of Australian legend. The memoir shows us that the 26-year-old Ned could have escaped to America with his wife, but chose to remain in Victoria because he hoped somehow to free his mother, who was serving a jail sentence in Melbourne. The memoir also describes the origin of the famous iron armor that Ned was wearing when he was captured.

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Narrated in the first person, the transforming events of Peter's life as a 15 year old are told years later. The opening paragraphs set the scene: "the older brother who went off to school" leaving "the brilliant . . . mother . . . bereft"; the father, "son of a bankrupt Hudson Valley apple grower"; "the darkening drift and dismay of my parents." Into this family unease steps the local veterinarian, Dr. Mason, whom Peter assists during after-school hours, and who is a sometime dinner guest in his parents' home.

Dr. Mason not only tries to persuade Peter to go into a medical profession, ignoring Peter's interests (writing poetry, reading about mountain climbing) but self-importantly insists on "offering [him] lessons in nothing less than all of life" (63). Dr. Mason, we learn, is singularly unqualified to dispense such lessons. He is, at least in Peter's eyes, overbearing and insensitive in his interactions with the owners of the pets he treats, and perhaps even unethical in his professional decisions. Then, Peter discovers, his mother is having an affair with Dr. Mason (who is also married). It is the burden of this knowledge that drives the narrative.

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This autobiography by Janet Frame, a preeminent New Zealand writer, was originally published in three volumes in 1982, 1984, and 1985. The first volume is titled To the Is-land. In it the author tells the story of her early life "with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths." She describes her mother as a rememberer and a talker, partly exiled from her family through a marriage outside the family's faith and her father as having a strong sense of formal behavior that did not allow him the luxury of reminiscence. Her siblings (4 sisters and 1 brother) are described in equally perceptive language. The brother suffered from epilepsy which was poorly controlled and this had a strong influence on family dynamics.

Frame's writing is so descriptive and personal that it is easy to envision oneself as a family member. She was very early attracted to words and became a voracious reader. The family was poor and moved often but there was a firm family kinship. One older and one younger sister drowned when swimming which had a large impact and drew Janet much closer to the remaining younger sister. Janet was a good student and won many prizes; she writes that she "identified most easily with the stoical, solitary heroine suffering in silence."

The second volume, An Angel at My Table, concerns itself with Janet's experience as a student at Dunedin (Teacher)Training College and her subsequent breakdown and commitment to mental institutions. She was very lonely in college and retreated more and more into her own world of literature. At the end of her year of probationary teaching she walked out of the room during the visit of the school's inspector and disappeared.

After a suicide attempt she was eventually committed to Seacliff, a mental hospital. Her stay there, she writes, and later in another facility which eventually lasted most of seven years, was in a world she'd never known among people whose existences she never thought possible. She describes it as an intensive course in the horrors of insanity. She received multiple electric shock treatments and was scheduled for a lobotomy when it was learned that she had won a prestigious award for a book she had written.

Frame was discharged on probation and lived for a while in a small cottage owned by a well known writer who befriended her. After her book of prose and poems was accepted for publication she was awarded a grant that allowed her to travel abroad.

The third volume, The Envoy from Mirror City, is quite mystical and concerns itself with her life as a writer in England, Spain, and New Zealand after her return. She describes Mirror City as the saving world which sustains writers. She has continued writing and eventually learned that the diagnosis of schizophrenia, with which she had been burdened, was incorrect. With some life experience and wise psychotherapy she was able to write about her life in the mental institutions, among other things.

In all she has published eleven novels, four collections of short stories, a volume of poetry and a children's book.

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This is a collection of humorous sketches first published in 1850. They purport to describe the youthful experience (and antics) of an elderly "swamp doctor" named Dr. Madison Tensas. In fact, they are the work of Henry Clay Lewis, a young Jewish-American doctor who, after graduating from the Louisville Medical Institute in 1846, set up practice in MADISON County, Louisiana, along the banks of the TENSAS River.

The Introduction of this edition, written by Edwin T. Arnold, locates Henry Clay Lewis and his work within the context of 19th Century "South and Southwest Humor," and briefly discusses each piece. One of his major points is that the swamp doctor's "odd leaves" contain a dark, almost Gothic strain, thoroughly mixed in with their humorous and prankish sensibility. (Perhaps "lack of sensibility" would be a better phrase to use to describe these sketches.)

The first brief sketch compares characteristics of the "city physician" with the "swamp doctor." After this, we follow the growth and development of "Dr. Tensas" from childhood through medical school and into his practice in the swamp country of Louisiana. Among the more notable sketches are "Getting Acquainted with the Medicine," in which the student's preceptor conceals his bottle of whiskey by labeling it "tincture of arsenic"; "The Curious Widow," in which the student prepares a gristly surprise for his snooping landlady; "Being Examined for My Degree," which demonstrates the comic vagaries of oral examinations; "My First Call in the Swamp," in which the newly minted doctor cures his first patient (more or less); and "How to Cure Fits," which presents a novel and efficient treatment for hysterical disorders.

If you want to find some genuine clinical wisdom in this book, look no further than "My First Call in the Swamp," where the author observes, "if you wish to ruin yourself in the estimation of your female patients, hint that the disease they are laboring under is connected with hysterics" (p. 146).

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Motivated at first by an attachment to her strict and demanding ballet teacher, as well as frustration and disgust with her own body compared to other dancers', Francesca develops an obsession with weight loss and increasingly ritualized forms of self-discipline in eating and exercise that lead to severe anorexia nervosa. It takes her family several months to see and acknowledge what is happening in front of them, during which she has trained herself to eat less and less, to throw up after meals, and to push herself to the point of exhaustion.

She becomes secretive, isolates herself from friends, and puts up a wall between herself and her parents, who are unable fully to understand the degree to which her behavior has gone beyond her control, but are worried. A compassionate male therapist with clear boundaries and a non-judgmental approach finally succeeds in disengaging Francesca from the mutually destructive downward spiral of family conflict around her illness;

he helps her to envision and desire her own health and to take responsibility for recovery. The story is told in the third person, but from Francesca's point of view.

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Katie is a promising figure skater whose divorced mother drives her relentlessly to perfect her skills, at almost any expense. What her mother and coach don't know, but her English teacher begins to figure out, is that when Katie gets to an emotional edge, she hides and cuts herself; the pain and blood help focus her mind. Not until she goes over that edge one day at school and begins slamming her locker door on her hand and then banging her head on the wall does she begin to get the professional help she needs.

After a couple of false starts, she finds a psychiatrist experienced in working with teens in trouble who enables her to tell truths she hasn't for years been able to admit to herself or speak of to anyone else. Her mother resists other adults' help and almost succeeds in getting her out of therapy, especially group therapy with girls her mother labels "delinquents." But Katie finally manages to make some choices against her mother's wishes--an immense step out of the depths of years of co-dependence.

As the story ends, she has come to realize the girls in the group are capable of being real friends--something she hasn't had for a long while--and she is capable of making choices toward her own healing, the first of which is to seek and accept real help and to distinguish it from pleasing adults who are using her to assuage their own pain.

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