Customer Reviews

The Plain Language of Love and Loss

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This is a very moving story of what it was like to grow up in a Quaker family during and after the Viet Nam War. She deals forthrightly with the inevitable conflict that comes through our need to fit in with our peers while maintaining the values inculcated by our family.

She also deals with the inevitable shading or blurring of recollection that we face when we try to find out what really happened decades ago, why, and what it meant. The portraits she draws of her family members are sharp and clear.

I bought this book mostly because I went to George School , a quaker boarding school . I didn't expect to like the book as much as I did. I've read over 100 memoirs and this is one of the best I've ever read. It is very well written. I read it in two sittings. It is an honest account of a tragic death of a loved one and how a family copes with the loss.

This book starts out slowly but gathers steam and power as Beth Taylor, the inquiring journalist and self-journalist, proceeds to interrogate the tragedy of suicide. Her brother Geoff hanged himself at age 14; this book documents the mantle of mystery that always hangs over self-destruction and the legacy of depression it engenders. The last chapter is in the tradition of a Quaker spiritual autobiography, as Beth explains why we need a concept of Sin and a Christ-centered church in order to achieve forgiveness - every week.

The narrator is fearless in confronting even her powerful father and diagnosing her parents' marriage and revealing undefined stresses in her own marriage -- all to demonstrate the courage one needs to live fully and be true to one's self. This three-hankie book is much more than the usual tale of sad loss.