Word: gracing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Grace Strasser-Mendana, slowly dying of cancer, tries, as the sardonic narrator of the book, to understand herself and the increasingly unintelligible world around her. She declares that she will be the witness in history to a California woman and by empirical evidence will piece together Charlotte Douglas's life. It is through this narration that we learn that Charlotte believes the world is peopled with others like herself and, as a result, selectively remembers events to conform to this idea. Charlotte has lost her child, Marin, to history, and this event disrupts the complacency of her life. The newspaper...
...realities of death, unhappiness, the sordid side of sex, and poeple using each other, are all victims of this selective memory--the only way in which Charlotte, as a child of a comfortable family in the temperate zone, can come to term with the present. Grace tells us, "she was immaculate of history and innocent of politics." Marin's disappearance is "the only event in Charlotte's life to resist her revisions and erasures." Ultimately, it is Marin who makes Charlotte realize that "it" really does not come out alright...
Charlotte's fear, Grace Strasser-Mendana tells us, is that of looking back. The axiom, "Remember Lot's Wife, avoid the backward glance," dictated Charlotte's life until Marin disappeared. And then despite her outward ignorance of the world around her--her desire for this child like protection from life--the past is unwillingly thrust upon her as an explanation for the present complications. But for a person who has always believed that things work out fine in the end, the rising to the surface of past failures is the ultimate blow. "It wasn't the way she thought...
Like a chant throughout the book, Grace, in her methodical analytical way states, "We all remember what we need to remember." Even empirical evidence--"Give me the molecular structure of the protein which defined Charlotte Douglas," she demands at the book's beginning--is subject to the internal mechanism in each person which attempts to make life more palatable, spoon-feeding it to us bit by bit, memory by memory. The repeated staccato phrases throughout A Book of Common Prayer, like the responsive readings in a hymn book, form the kernels of the emerging past for Charlotte. Like a slightly...
...Grace M. Levin, a day-care worker at the Children's Community Day Care in Cambridge, said yesterday a group of 25 staged a sit-in at Sullivan's office to protest the center's closing. Sullivan refused to meet with the demonstrators...