The Wilder Life
1 journaler for this copy...
7 stars: Good
From the back cover: Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder- a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places McClure has never been to yet somehow knows by heart. She traces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family- looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. She immerses herself in all things Little House - from TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment r sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "The Laura experience." Along the way she comes to understand how Wilder's life and work have shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American west.
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I grew up on both the Little House books and the TV show. I definitely liked them and reread/rewatched, though I wouldn't call myself a fan who memorized everything or idolized it. When this book came up at a meetup, I grabbed and am glad I did. It was fun, humorous, and I learned quite a bit about what was and wasn't real in the Little House books. REcommended for anyone with more than a passing interest in the series.
Some quotes I liked:
You know Mary's the good one, right? ... Mary's goodness is like a big blue sponge so absorbent that it passively sucks up all the positive attention, so that all the compliments and the candy hearts with the prettiest sayings on them inevitably come her way. You have to wonder if her behavior keeps her hair golden as well. ... Mary cops the truth, 'I wasn't really wanting to be good. I was showing off to myself, what a good little girl I was, and being vain and proud, and I deserved to be slapped for it." Laura was shocked. Then suddenly she felt she had known that, all the time. Oh yes, and so did we.
I think ultimately what makes the Little House books so compelling is that they're real girls lives reimagined. Silver Lake hints that the kind of life Lena led was a rough and overworked one, but somehow it seems equally true that she was as free as those black ponies. Larua herself gets to see more of the world as a fictional girl than she ever did as a real one...in correspondance to her daughter she admits this.
Sometimes Laura World wasn't a realm of log cabins or prairies, it was a way of being. Really, a way of being happy. I wasn't into the flowery sayings, but I was nonetheless in love with the idea of serene rooms full of endless quiet and time, of sky in the windows, ... where all the days were capacious enough to bake bread and write novels and perambulate wooded hills deep in thought.
There's evidence that Rose considered writing a biography of Almanzo, to be titled "A Son of the Soil" but its believed that he was so reticent in interviews she abandoned the project. Or perhaps its because he lacked the optimism that Rose had likely hoped to portray. "My life has been mostly disappointments" he wrote in a letter to her in 1937.
Maybe the Little HOuse Books have always been a way to "unremember"... To me, unremembering is knowing that something once happened or existed by remembering the things around it or by putting something else in its place. Laura Ingalls Wilder unremembered being hungry by writing "Farmer Boy" and Rose Wilder Land unremembered her terrible childhood by helping her mother write about hers.
From the back cover: Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder- a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places McClure has never been to yet somehow knows by heart. She traces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family- looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. She immerses herself in all things Little House - from TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment r sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "The Laura experience." Along the way she comes to understand how Wilder's life and work have shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American west.
------------
I grew up on both the Little House books and the TV show. I definitely liked them and reread/rewatched, though I wouldn't call myself a fan who memorized everything or idolized it. When this book came up at a meetup, I grabbed and am glad I did. It was fun, humorous, and I learned quite a bit about what was and wasn't real in the Little House books. REcommended for anyone with more than a passing interest in the series.
Some quotes I liked:
You know Mary's the good one, right? ... Mary's goodness is like a big blue sponge so absorbent that it passively sucks up all the positive attention, so that all the compliments and the candy hearts with the prettiest sayings on them inevitably come her way. You have to wonder if her behavior keeps her hair golden as well. ... Mary cops the truth, 'I wasn't really wanting to be good. I was showing off to myself, what a good little girl I was, and being vain and proud, and I deserved to be slapped for it." Laura was shocked. Then suddenly she felt she had known that, all the time. Oh yes, and so did we.
I think ultimately what makes the Little House books so compelling is that they're real girls lives reimagined. Silver Lake hints that the kind of life Lena led was a rough and overworked one, but somehow it seems equally true that she was as free as those black ponies. Larua herself gets to see more of the world as a fictional girl than she ever did as a real one...in correspondance to her daughter she admits this.
Sometimes Laura World wasn't a realm of log cabins or prairies, it was a way of being. Really, a way of being happy. I wasn't into the flowery sayings, but I was nonetheless in love with the idea of serene rooms full of endless quiet and time, of sky in the windows, ... where all the days were capacious enough to bake bread and write novels and perambulate wooded hills deep in thought.
There's evidence that Rose considered writing a biography of Almanzo, to be titled "A Son of the Soil" but its believed that he was so reticent in interviews she abandoned the project. Or perhaps its because he lacked the optimism that Rose had likely hoped to portray. "My life has been mostly disappointments" he wrote in a letter to her in 1937.
Maybe the Little HOuse Books have always been a way to "unremember"... To me, unremembering is knowing that something once happened or existed by remembering the things around it or by putting something else in its place. Laura Ingalls Wilder unremembered being hungry by writing "Farmer Boy" and Rose Wilder Land unremembered her terrible childhood by helping her mother write about hers.
