Nora Jane: A Life in Stories by Ellen Gilchrist (Back Bay Books, $14.95)
"She was a beautiful child who looked so much like her dead father that it broke her mother's heart and made her drink. It made her grandmother glad. Nora Jane's father had been her oldest son. She thought God had given Nora Jane to her to make up for losing him. Nora Jane's grandmother was a deeply religious woman who had been given to ecstatic states when she was young. It never occurred to her to rail at God or blame him for things. She thought of God as a fallback position in times of trouble. She thought of God as solace, patience, wisdom, forgiveness, compensation.
Nora Jane's mother had a darker, meaner view. She thought God and other people were to blame for everything that went wrong. She thought they had gotten together to kill her beautiful black-haired husband and she was paying them back by staying inside and drinking herself to death. Still, it wasn't her fault she was weak. Her mother had been weak before her and her mother before that. It was their habit to be weak.
Nora Jane's grandmother came from a line of women who had a habit of being strong.…When she was about four years old Nora Jane had looked at the strong story and the weak story and decided to be strong. It was the year her father died and her grandmother sat in the swing on her porch and…believed that God did not hate her even if he had allowed her son to die in a stupid war." --excerpted from the book
