Occasions of Sin: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: "Occasions for Pleasure"
Review: A new book by Sandra Scofield is always an occasion for pleasure and this memoir, which has been long awaited,delivers great satisfaction. Faithful readers of Scofield's many wonderful and personal novels have been waiting to hear the personal stories of her life to see how everything comes together. As always the writing is evocative and nostalgic,and the mother-daughter relationship here is rendered with such care. This puts into a clearer light all the other memorable mother-daughter pairs in the other novels. If you've ever read Scofield before, you will want to read this memoir now. If you haven't read Scofield before, this is a great place to start. I recommend it highly. Having reviewed her books (and many others)professionally, I can truthfully say that this is a gem.

Rating:
Summary: "Occasions for Pleasure"
Review: A new book by Sandra Scofield is always an occasion for pleasure and this memoir, which has been long awaited,delivers great satisfaction. Faithful readers of Scofield's many wonderful and personal novels have been waiting to hear the personal stories of her life to see how everything comes together. As always the writing is evocative and nostalgic,and the mother-daughter relationship here is rendered with such care. This puts into a clearer light all the other memorable mother-daughter pairs in the other novels. If you've ever read Scofield before, you will want to read this memoir now. If you haven't read Scofield before, this is a great place to start. I recommend it highly. Having reviewed her books (and many others)professionally, I can truthfully say that this is a gem.

Rating:
Summary: a compassionate, unsentimental reflection on coming of age
Review: I was first introduced to Scofield's bright and tight prose last summer, and read two of her novels before coming to her memoir. For writers and readers interested in the cross-fertilization between fiction and reality, reading her latest novel, Plain Seeing, and then reading Occasions of Sin provides a great object lesson in the entwining of the two. Events that might appear resolved in the novel are unraveled in the memoir, only to be reknit in a different pattern. And what permeates most strongly from Occasions of Sin is the mature and forgiving voice of the narrator/author, who cuts a slice of life, observes it with compassion, humor, and a healthy distance, and shares it with the world. It is at once a testimony and a quiet, unsentimental celebration of a particular family, whose members endure through poverty and illness, adapt, and move on.
I am now reading Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage, which is also a memoir about a young woman coming to age in a family life and culture governed by religion. While Scofield's story takes place mostly in Texas, and is structured around her mother's adoption of Catholicism, Ahmed's privileged childhood was spent in Cairo and Alexandria, and was governed by Islam. Still, I found some interesting and powerful threads running through the two works.

Rating:
Summary: a memoir of religiousity and abandonment
Review: Sandra Scofield has written a moving description of her life as a Catholic convert growing up in northwest Texas in the early '50s. Her experiences at the Academy of Mary Immaculate in Wichita Falls recall the year I spent there in 1953-54 before moving to the Catholic school across town. This is a world where girls align stones on the ground at recess to outline the rooms of an "abbey" (or "home," in my case) in which they play. Sandra is not the only young girl to have made an altar at home or to have knelt at a neighbor's house for the weekly Rosary and I was excited to revive these memories through her prose.

If I'm not mistaken, the cover photo is of the local public swimming pool called "Sandy Beach," a concrete "beach" surrounded by a chain link fence. Perhaps this is a metaphor for her dying mother - a woman of great promise but few resources to adequately nurture either herself or her daughter. Fortunately, the Catholic schools valued academic achievement and provided Sandra with the only stable home she had, but only in the context of a religious ecstasy cultivated initially by her mother. Since I shared that alternate reality, perhaps it was not the exclusive purview of her and her mother, but rather a more general effect of Red River Valley Catholic culture of the '50s.

The lack of nuturing and loss of her mother take their toll, and the maturing Sandra endures devastating humiliation. This memoir and her previous works attest to her survival, but this book ends long before these accomplishments. I would highly recommend this book based on the compelling nature of its elegantly simple and straightforward prose, but I wonder how much of my pleasure in reading this came from the memories evoked by Sandra's earlier experiences at AMI and in Wichita Falls.

Rating:
Summary: a memoir of religiousity and abandonment
Review: Scofield's memoir deals almost exclusively with her childhood years, when, as a young child, she develops only a vague sense of the boundaries between her mother and herself. The mother, Edith Hupp, has no such clear perspective, her malleable young daughter almost more a companion than a child. Because of Edith's manipulation, Sandra sees herself differently than others, not bound by the same rules. Years later, after Edith's death, Scofield describes her life as "navigating chaos without any reliable compass."

The whole family lives with the maternal grandmother during the earliest years of Edith's illness, when she still has her looks and occasional periods of health. Conversion to Catholicism creates another strong bond between Edith and Sandra, as the legends and rituals of her new religion captivate the child, who claims it with innocent zeal. Thereafter, Sandra dedicates her young life to emulating the saints. The tragedy of Edith's long journey toward death has a profound affect on the child, who develops nervous habits, praying incessantly. In her childish naiveté, Sandra fervently prays that her mother won't die.

Little girls are given to excessive drama, with their impressionable minds, especially fed on a steady diet of religious fervor. I was one of these little girls. I recall the same distorted thought process when praying, as if God was mine alone: a basic misunderstanding of the nature of prayer. I used this flawed perspective, as does Scofield, where God becomes Prince Charming, to "rescue you not from death, but from anonymity". Also of note, is the particular innocence of the 1950's, the perfect breeding ground for Catholic girls.

Most of Scofield's formative years are solitary, hours of thorough convent education, along with intermittent visits to an ever more sickly mother. Through this distorted framework, a distant father and a grandmother often at odds with her daughter do little to alleviate the child's loneliness. Edith finally dies from chronic nephritis, after years of hospital stays and shock treatments, but Scofield has no basis for structuring a life to serve her best interests.

Soon after the death, Scofield suffers a traumatic incident that strips away her innocence, an already shaky persona shattered... and so ends the memoir. Although this memoir is decidedly purgative, there is no way to ascertain the author's approach to adulthood. Confused by a dysfunctional home life and excessive religious instruction, the sheltered existence has only served to cripple Sandra in her dealings with the world at large.
Original Sin is a portrayal of Scofield's life, Part One, but the memoir begs completion. Scofield has survived, but is she emotionally crippled by her early years? I am, after all, unsatisfied. There is closure to the past, but what of the present? Luan Gaines/2004.

Rating:
Summary: A rapturous memoir of difficult family love
Review: This is a deeply personal story of a very bright girl growing up with a mother who would die young. The mother was sensitive, intelligent and exquisitely beautiful (beautiful enough to go to Hollywood, which she did indeed for a time); in the end though, she was also unable to escape from the constrictions of her working class life and a debilitating disease which took her when her daughter was seventeen. The growing girl also adored her grandmother, a more down to earth woman, who provided much needed stability, but the girl was caught between the two women who often quarreled. "I went from mother to grandmother as if I carried two passports" writes Sandra Scofield, but in the end it is from these two strong feminine forces pushing and pulling that the girl will form years later into a much acclaimed novelist and teacher.

Sandra Scofield writes perceptively of the ways in which each person's individuality presses against those closest to them, how we press back, and how from these forces we eventually emerge in our own shape and way of being, claiming the memories of our journey and becoming our own force in the world. A beautiful book. The mother's fate is heartbreaking, the grandmother stalwart and though exasperating at times always faithful, and the memoir of them both unforgettable.

Particularly recommended for women who loved their mothers but did not always have an easy time with them, and that includes many women I know for certain.