The Life She Wished to Live by Ann McCutchan

Author:Ann McCutchan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Good Women, Marriage, and a Memoir

1940–42

IN THE LAST MONTHS OF 1940, Marjorie was at her typewriter in the woods, struggling with Cross Creek. She found it nearly impossible to avoid what she considered “personal” touches, whereas she’d intended a removed chronicle. But a memoir is by definition personal—the past seen through the author’s particular lens—and she could hardly avoid revealing herself as narrator-character, though she often wrote from a collective “we.” Work went slowly. There had been a freeze at the grove, the ugly remains mirroring her mood. If she escaped to the beach cottage, she told Max, her workers would fight among themselves, “and I have only now gotten them straightened out after my summer’s absence.” The usual inconveniences both annoyed her and fired her sense of humor. One day, she killed a moccasin snake in her bathroom, first by heaving a Sears & Roebuck catalog at it, then by beating it to death with a copy of The Yearling. “Don’t mind me sputtering,” she wrote. “I have learned that I always feel this way when I’m working something out, but God it is torment.”

The good editor reminded her: “Of course you need not be strictly bound by fact. In such a book you can move things around rightly so long as you give the poetic truth. But you know all about that, anyhow.”

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