A Girl's Life

by Marianne Gingher

"A meditation on the comforts of homeplace and family, A Girl's Life celebrates the last era in America, the 1950s and 1960s, when it was still possible to enjoy a cynicism-free girlhood - when "it was still safe for children to take gifts from strangers and not yet unwise for them to leave the doors of their hearts unlocked." As Eudora Welty wrote in her autobiographical memoir One Writer's Beginnings, "A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within." The seventeen personal narratives collected here corroborate Welty's conviction.". "Arranged in a loose chronology, the tales document a southern white girl's middle-class initiation into the adult world. The first section, "Sanctuary," recalls Gingher's earliest impressions of family dynamics and shelter, a child's yearnings and resourcefulness. "Truths and Grit," the second section, deals with the tempering of bliss, a young girl's first encounters with corruption and mortality. In the final gr