The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (Crosswicks Journal)

L'Engle's memoir of the summer her 90-year-old mother took a steep decline into dementia (and ultimately passed away). I reacted to this book on three different and almost entirely separate levels:

1. It is impossible for me to talk about this book without mentioning the fact that my 89-year-old

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grandmother is currently undergoing a similar (but slower) decline. Some parts were eerily, almost uncomfortably familiar -- both the ways her mother is affected by her dementia and L'Engle's reactions to the situation. Her insights and... I want to say "confessions," often brought tears to my eyes. If this is not something you've experienced, I don't know whether this book would touch you the way it touched me, though L'Engle's gift of storytelling makes it possible. Which brings me to...

2. This book brought home to me exactly (or nearly) how good a writer L'Engle really is. I became familiar with her writing as a preteen and always knew there was something special about her books, but about few of them do I have any sort of adult perspective. The Summer of the Great-Grandmother is a memoir, and yet it reads like a novel in the best way. The characters are complex and deep; L'Engle must have a gift of understanding other people to bring them alive the way she does. Ironically, it's harder to write about real people in a vivid way than it is to write about characters. The combination, here, of that fictional character depth with factual recounting was startlingly effective.

3. As someone who is very, very well acquainted with L'Engle's oeuvre, I also found it fascinating to see how much in her stories is pulled from her real life. Which is not to discount or denigrate those stories; she blends her real experiences with fiction in a completely seamless way. But on almost every page I encountered a plot point, a place, or a name that was familiar from her novels, and it always made me smile.

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After reading, and enjoying the first of the Crosswicks Journals, 'A Circle of Quiet', I was pleased to be able to borrow the second of them from a friend. This is the story of the summer when Madeleine L'Engle's mother was in the last stages of Alzheimer's disease, frail and forgetful, yet still

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an important member of the family.

The book consists of reflections about the past, anecdotes from the author's childhood, stories she had heard about her mother and her own grandparents and many other relatives. I found the number of different people mentioned to be a bit overwhelming and easily lost track of who was whom - but nonetheless, enjoyed the writing. It's thoughtful, sometimes moving, and gives an intriguing picture of the simpler life of the previous decades.

Recommended.

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