Oh Manly, I Love You So Much

I had originally intended to re-start this blog in January as one of those New Year's kind of things, but then I read THIS BOOK and I knew I had to start right away.

Our first book is The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure and for the love of Half Pint, it is fabulous! Laugh out loud funny and spot on for a kid of the 70's, which I am. Amazon describes it thus:

"Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder-a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she's never been to, yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family- looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. She immerses herself in all things Little House, and explores the story from fact to fiction, and from the TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment or sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "the Laura experience." Along the way she comes to understand how Wilder's life and work have shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American West."

Yeah, okay, I guess you could describe it that way, but it sounds so serious, right? Based on that description, my enthusiasm was a bit limited and I put off reading it for a quite a while (it came out last spring, I think). Big mistake. Huge. (Pretty Woman, anyone?) I read it in about two days and it would have been less if I hadn't had all those pesky real life things to do. I could not put it down. Hilarious.

Wendy McClure is about my age and actually went to the same high school as The Husband. I was very excited when I realized this and went running for his yearbooks, but she graduated the year before he started. Bummer. Anyway, she and I completely see LHOP the same way and I very much appreciated not only her similar view of books that I loved so much, but also her sense of humor about it, which is heavily laced with sarcasm. I'm a big fan of sarcasm, something that is in oddly short supply here in the heartland. Makes me nuts. They're all so sincere. Don't they realize that sarcasm is the Northeast way of saying you care?

But I digress. So, Wendy (I don't think she'd mind if I call her Wendy, do you?) is a big fan of the books and always wanted to be Laura when she was growing up. Me too! For Halloween when I was about 7 or so, I dressed up as Laura, complete with a sunbonnet purchased at the Dutch Pantry in Mansfield PA. Because my hair is reddish blonde, people automatically assumed I was Mary, not Laura, and I was very put out by this, as I'm sure Wendy would have been too. “But Mary is also so insufferably dull that it makes Laura’s badness seem quite reasonable, especially to those of us with an inner girl who likes to let down her sunbonnet once in a while. Which is to say, most of us.” Loc. 1161 (I read the book on the Kindle and I don't know what the etiquette is for quoting...anyone?)

As an adult, Wendy starts reading the books again and eventually goes on a quest to find out all about the real life locations and about Laura herself. Now, in the late 90's, I was living in western Massachusetts and definitely at a crossroads in my life. For whatever reason, I started checking all the Little House books out of the local library and re-reading them or reading some of them for the first time since in my actual youth the later books all bored me. I liked young, adventurous Laura, not older, marrying and settling down Laura, a feeling I think certain others might share: “In my mind, the world of the Little House books just went up in smoke at the end, their heroine disappearing into clumsy ordinariness and ignominy. It had always trailed off with a vague, unspoken disappointment. It’s the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it’s all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress – it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!” Loc. 360

The library let me down when it was time for Farmer Boy and I was very worked up about this and complained to the high school students I was directing in a play at the time. I'm sure they thought I was crazy, but that did not stop them from buying a hardcover copy of Farmer Boy and signing it for my director's gift. One of the best gifts I've ever received, actually.

This was before the internet was The Internet, so I couldn't avail myself of the full world of crazy that Wendy McClure found and I think I'm happier that way. I'm jealous of her travels and would still like to make the trip(s) someday, probably when The Child is a little older and hopefully wants to go herself. I think I would have been horrified and disappointed at the types that share Laura World (Who knew it was such a favorite among the home schooling crowd? “They were all nice folks who shared my love of Laura but maybe not my support for legalizing gay marriage.” Loc. 2564), so it's good that I am now prepared for this. It was fascinating to see how much of the story is real and how much more is not. Like most people, I think, I've always assumed they books were basically autobiographical and didn't Laura have such an amazing life? Amazing, yes. True...maybe not so much. And I guess that's okay. But now I am reading them with The Child, who is 5, and part of what she finds cool about these books is that the people in them really lived, which is true, and all these things actually happened. Not sure what to do with that. Suddenly LHOP has entered Santa Claus realm. When do you tell the children the truth???

Another wonderful thing for me in this book was Wendy's utter disdain for the TV show. I loathed the TV show as a kid and it was my first experience of how much books can change when they are put into movie or TV form. It's not good and it has nothing whatsoever in common with the books, other than the character names. Some of them. Who is Albert? What is he doing there? Why is he addicted to morphine? I don't understand!!!! Like Wendy, though, I did develop something of a weird affection for it as I got older. For some reason in college, my friend, Louisa, and I took to watching it a lot. Our very favorite - or at least the one we remember - was the episode called "Annabelle," where the circus comes to town and Mr. Oleson is all ashamed because his sister, the titular Annabelle, is the fat lady in the circus! Horrors! This is not what makes the episode awesome, however. It's when Laura is mooning about over Almanzo and trying to figure out how to invite him to the circus. One of her practice lines: "Oh, Manly, I love you so much. Please go to the circus with me." It's amazing they ever got together and you have to think it only happens because the book said so. You can see the actual moment right here. It is in the first minute and it’s AWESOME. But you kind of knew that, since it’s been 20+ years since I watched that episode and I still remember it. (Don't know why I can't embed on this one. Bummer)

But the best thing about this book is the love for LHOP, for Laura World, and for all that those things embody. Even with all the craziness, or maybe in spite of it, I still want to sit down and re-read every one of them again. I look forward to sharing more of these books with my daughter and hope that someday she wants to read this book too. Whether Laura's life really happened that way or not doesn't really matter. "Sometimes, Laura World wasn’t a realm of log cabins or prairies, it was a way of being. Really, a way of being happy.” Loc. 2321