These is My Words

I recently completed a book for my inaugural attendance at book group. Unfortunately, no one read it, everyone was out of town, etc etc, so book group did not take place. I was disappointed as I have been looking forward to casing out potential friends, general dispositions and personalities, and getting a handle on what the book group here is like.

Anyway, I read the book and it turned out to be pretty good.

These is My Words

This is a fictionalized diary of a woman who lived in the southwest in the late 1800's. Her life is full of Indian and homestead troubles. Her brother and father are victims of the trek in the very early days of the journal, and all around, her life is very hard. She marries a family friend, but the marriage is loveless, and after her husband dies in a horse accident, she finds her true love (takes her a while to realize this), marries him, and then he dies at the end of her journal too.

Supposedly, this is based on the author's great-grandmother who also settled in the Tucson area. I wonder though--can this many bad things happen to one person? Is this an amalgamation of all the kinds of terrible things that could happen to a woman in the wild west? It seems like it would be an unusual case where one woman's life is filled with so much tragedy.

I also had a hard time suspending my awareness that this was written by a writer, not a novice journal keeper. Who keeps a diary like this, with so many details as to advance a story like this?

In addition, though, to being a pretty good story, I found the insights on gender roles to be interesting. Even though Sarah, the narrator, could ride horses, shoot guns ably, and kill Indians, she was still very much in charge of home and hearth. I suppose that a lot of women were forced by neccessity to learn skills to keep their ranches going, to learn how to protect themselves from rattlesnakes, etc. But, the men portrayed here were seldom involved with caring for children, making meals, or cleaning their homes. Not too surprising, I guess, but Sarah really could do it all, as evidenced by the several years she ran her ranch as a single mother.