The Daily Campus

Issue date: 10/2/08 Section: Focus

Media Credit: Chase Smith Margaret Gibson read from her memoir, 'Prodigal Daughter,' Wednesday at the Co-op.

A small but appreciative crowd turned out Wednesday afternoon at the UConn Co-op to hear Lynn Z. Bloom and Margaret Gibson recall the pains and pleasures of girlhood.

For Gibson, better known for her poetry (the latest volume of which, "One Body," recently took home the gold at the Connecticut Book Awards), tackling the memoir was an act of love.

"How can you love and not know it?" she asked the audience, composed mainly of UConn faculty, interspersed with a few students.

The question was not rhetorical. After her sister suffered a stroke in 2000, Gibson realized that, despite their many differences, deep love and a shared history still bound them to each other.

The selections she read from her memoir, "Prodigal Daughter," returned to their girlhood in Richmond, Va. As Gibson remarked, the selections touched on "sex and private schools," but they were more than a prurient glimpse of religiously-stifled teen angst and longing.

For Gibson, the sharp pangs of growing up, enthralled and yet intimidated by her girlishly sultry older classmates, were heightened by her burgeoning writer's sensitivity to the ache of adolescent fears and desires.

Describing herself as "gawky, tongue-tied and envious [compared to her more poised school friends]," Gibson recalled her and her sister's Southern girlhoods as "heroines in training," forever half afraid and half longing for signs of the Devil's influence.

Lynn Bloom, the second voice of the afternoon, complemented Gibson's recollections with her own stories of growing up in the shadow of World War II deprivations and fears.

In a selection drawn from her collection of essays, "The Seven Deadly Virtues," Bloom evoked the pain and innocent incomprehension of a young girl faced with the usual difficulties of growing up and with her mother's undiagnosed depression.

"I was going to be a novelist, like Dr. Seuss," Bloom read, revealing her early impulse toward literature, even as her mother's "suitcase full of rage" remained evident, never to be discussed, during her family's more trying times.

Bloom, like Gibson, began the process of writing her memoirs as a testament to her love for her family, and a desire to come to grips with it.

In some ways, she said, her childhood and adult selves joined forces in the writing of the book, uniting "a child who didn't know what was going on - and an adult who in some ways also didn't know."

"It was only really when I started to write this that I could control my own understanding."

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools