Occasions of Sin: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Sandra Jean Scofield (Author), Sandra Scofield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2004

In 1959, when Snadra Scofield was 15, she came home to stay in West Texas after years in Catholic boarding schools. She believed her presence would inspire her invalid mother to live. What she found - a fractured family; a distracted, dying mother - nudged her into the tumult of late adolescence and the awakening of her sexuality. More than 40 years later, Scofield looks back on her Catholic girlhood and the ways in which her relationship with her mother was grounded in their intertwined aspirations for holiness, achievement and love. Writing on the brink of old age, she looks back ruefuly but without bitterness, forgiving both her mother's frailty and her own.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Scofield's account of her childhood and teenage years will ring familiar with many readers. Although the book is framed by a specific time (the 1950s and '60s) and place (West Texas), its themes of wanting to be a perfect daughter, of trying to grasp the concepts of religion and God as a child, of fitting in among peers who seem far more mature are universal. Scofield's mother, Edith, lived a difficult life. A striking beauty, she had political ambitions yet was held back by a disapproving mother, two understandably needy young daughters and an often-absent husband. Edith, formerly Methodist, converted to Roman Catholicism when Scofield was a child, and brought Scofield and her sister up in the church. Much of Scofield's memoir concerns her years at Catholic boarding school, where she tried to find a balance between having an intimate relationship with God and fearing the iron-fisted nuns who monitored her every movement and prohibited contact with Scofield's adored and non-Catholic grandmother. Unlike many memoirists who write of growing up Catholic, novelist Scofield (Opal on Dry Ground; Plain Seeing; etc.) does not take a lighthearted look at her tumultuous childhood; rather, she marks her memories with an intense, reverent seriousness. When Scofield returned home at age 15 to live with Edith, the mother she'd idolized practically since birth, she was devastated to find her showing signs of grave illness, which turned out to be chronic nephritis, a kidney disease (she died a year later). Poignant and clearly cathartic, this is a tender, melancholic coming-of-age story.
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From Booklist

The author of Opal on Dry Ground (1994), a finalist for the National Book Award, Scofield here turns her hand to a memoir recalling her Catholic girlhood and the long months of her mother's dying. It has taken her 40 years to write "past the anger and grief and silence, back to my mother." In her carefully measured prose, Scofield makes vivid the repressive 1950s, especially for Catholics, specifically for women. Her mother, Edith, bore her out of wedlock in poverty-stricken circumstances. Although Edith eventually married and had more children, she was plagued by ill health. Her meager prospects seemed only to fuel her imagination and her desire to set herself apart. She fervidly embraced Catholicism and, in so doing, found the key to a better education for her children. When Edith succumbed to kidney disease, Sandra, angered and bewildered by her mother's death, and shut out by her father's new wife, entered adolescence with a vengeance. This is a deeply reflective and heartrending account conveying all that is lost when a child loses her mother. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (January 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393057356
• ISBN-13: 978-0393057355
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,653,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a compassionate, unsentimental reflection on coming of age, April 2, 2004

By 

Eleni Bastea (Albuquerque, New Mexico United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Occasions of Sin: A Memoir (Hardcover)

I was first introduced to Scofield's bright and tight prose last summer, and read two of her novels before coming to her memoir. For writers and readers interested in the cross-fertilization between fiction and reality, reading her latest novel, Plain Seeing, and then reading Occasions of Sin provides a great object lesson in the entwining of the two. Events that might appear resolved in the novel are unraveled in the memoir, only to be reknit in a different pattern. And what permeates most strongly from Occasions of Sin is the mature and forgiving voice of the narrator/author, who cuts a slice of life, observes it with compassion, humor, and a healthy distance, and shares it with the world. It is at once a testimony and a quiet, unsentimental celebration of a particular family, whose members endure through poverty and illness, adapt, and move on.
I am now reading Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage, which is also a memoir about a young woman coming to age in a family life and culture governed by religion. While Scofield's story takes place mostly in Texas, and is structured around her mother's adoption of Catholicism, Ahmed's privileged childhood was spent in Cairo and Alexandria, and was governed by Islam. Still, I found some interesting and powerful threads running through the two works.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rapturous memoir of difficult family love, January 9, 2004

By 

Stephanie Cowell (New York, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Occasions of Sin: A Memoir (Hardcover)

This is a deeply personal story of a very bright girl growing up with a mother who would die young. The mother was sensitive, intelligent and exquisitely beautiful (beautiful enough to go to Hollywood, which she did indeed for a time); in the end though, she was also unable to escape from the constrictions of her working class life and a debilitating disease which took her when her daughter was seventeen. The growing girl also adored her grandmother, a more down to earth woman, who provided much needed stability, but the girl was caught between the two women who often quarreled. "I went from mother to grandmother as if I carried two passports" writes Sandra Scofield, but in the end it is from these two strong feminine forces pushing and pulling that the girl will form years later into a much acclaimed novelist and teacher.

Sandra Scofield writes perceptively of the ways in which each person's individuality presses against those closest to them, how we press back, and how from these forces we eventually emerge in our own shape and way of being, claiming the memories of our journey and becoming our own force in the world. A beautiful book. The mother's fate is heartbreaking, the grandmother stalwart and though exasperating at times always faithful, and the memoir of them both unforgettable.

Particularly recommended for women who loved their mothers but did not always have an easy time with them, and that includes many women I know for certain.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a memoir of religiousity and abandonment, February 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Occasions of Sin: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Sandra Scofield has written a moving description of her life as a Catholic convert growing up in northwest Texas in the early '50s. Her experiences at the Academy of Mary Immaculate in Wichita Falls recall the year I spent there in 1953-54 before moving to the Catholic school across town. This is a world where girls align stones on the ground at recess to outline the rooms of an "abbey" (or "home," in my case) in which they play. Sandra is not the only young girl to have made an altar at home or to have knelt at a neighbor's house for the weekly Rosary and I was excited to revive these memories through her prose.

If I'm not mistaken, the cover photo is of the local public swimming pool called "Sandy Beach," a concrete "beach" surrounded by a chain link fence. Perhaps this is a metaphor for her dying mother - a woman of great promise but few resources to adequately nurture either herself or her daughter. Fortunately, the Catholic schools valued academic achievement and provided Sandra with the only stable home she had, but only in the context of a religious ecstasy cultivated initially by her mother. Since I shared that alternate reality, perhaps it was not the exclusive purview of her and her mother, but rather a more general effect of Red River Valley Catholic culture of the '50s.

The lack of nuturing and loss of her mother take their toll, and the maturing Sandra endures devastating humiliation. This memoir and her previous works attest to her survival, but this book ends long before these accomplishments. I would highly recommend this book based on the compelling nature of its elegantly simple and straightforward prose, but I wonder how much of my pleasure in reading this came from the memories evoked by Sandra's earlier experiences at AMI and in Wichita Falls.