The Rage Diaries: What I read TWO weeks ago: little ghostwriter on the prarie edition:
In terms of YA collections, few offer the jarring coda that Laura Ingalls Wilder's The First Four Years gives to the Little House books. What begins as a cozy set piece in the Wisconsin woods -- Pa, skilled at working the land, yet gentle enough in spirit to make music for his five-year-old Laura -- should end as a cozy set piece on the South Dakota prairie, with the 19-year-old Laura married to Almanzo, skilled at working the land, yet gentle enough in spirit to relate to skittish horses. And then, one book later, there's four years of unmitigated disaster.
The explanation given in the book is that it was merely a raw manuscript that hadn't been polished yet by editing. The truth, William Holtz argues in The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane, is that Laura's daughter Rose actually rewrote the books, and thereby deserves credit for establishing both the books' beautifully plain voice and their underlying theme of optimistic self-determination in the face of adversity. It may be the truth, but unfortunately for Holtz, the way he depicts his subject made me root against her. Part of the problem is a lack of a fine dramatic sense. When you consider the long odds Lane had to conquer in rising from a barefoot country schoolgirl to a well-heeled Harper's writer in the early 1900s, the simple "howdunit" would have made a compelling story. Unfortunately, Holtz adds a villian. His choice of antagonist is Laura Ingalls Wilder, whom he argues was a pitiless control freak and master manipulator of man. According to him, Rose was lucky to have emerged from childhood intact. An early chapter is given over to her travails as a sensitive child being raised by two rural parents; what made my sympathy evaporate was the casual, one-sentence mention that Laura worked as a seamstress 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, for a dollar a day, so that she could rebuild the family's farm stake. That monster!
The personality differences between parent and child fuel a lot of creative agita, and I don't blame Holtz for trying to answer the question "How does a sensitive, educated girl handle her dramatically different parents?" What I blame him for is his approach in the answer: practically swooning from empathy over every wrong the exceedingly emotional Rose recorded in her diary (things like her mother's casual comments, for example), he inadvertently paints a picture of a narcissist who wonders why the world can't see things her way. And the way Rose writes about Laura in her diary, one suspects her personal credo was "If it's not one thing, it's my mother."
I don't know if we'll ever know the truth about the working relationship Laura and Rose had; despite reading excerpts of Rose's letters and journals documenting the collaboration with her mother, I couldn't shake the sense that I was reading an unreliable narrator.
So in the end, there is still that troubling coda, a tidy eight-book collection and its ninth sullen sequel. Digging in to the backstory behind the books reminds me of the Raymond Chandler quote "If you liked a book, don't meet the author." In this case, readers might wish to avoid the author's family as well.

very nice.
shld read this blog regularly... it's via twop, I think, sobell or mrsobell's bio linking to it...
(am putting things here as I go thru dlcs. fussing with tags. always my motivation - not to forget. but to what purpose, if rather than enjoy I again worry how to not to forget? how to keep.)