Lorrie Moore on ‘Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage’ http://j.mp/15X1z87
Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have. Her stories are open, overflowing with life, unlike the curt and obscure minimalist stories so fashionable in the Seventies and Eighties. But no one could accuse her of being traditional, either. With all their fullness of narrative and character, her stories are elegant and sharp, pared down—sometimes shockingly so. Her new collection,Dear Life, is as rich and astonishing as anything she has done before.
Munro’s stories, in this book as in her earlier work, tend to be geographically concentrated, often based in a small town in Huron County, Ontario, or, sometimes, in Vancouver, British Columbia. They can, on the other hand, cover a vast expanse of temporal ground, passing through years, decades, eras, in a paragraph, even in a sentence. There are dramatic events: sudden deaths, disappearances, reappearances, beatings, misunderstandings, and improbable coincidences—but the stories do not often revolve around them.
This is one of the many, many delights of an Alice Munro story—the way she makes the ordinary jump out, like a lithe, muscular, startled cat, and the way she lets the extraordinary quietly take its place in line, hands folded, head down. A death will not so much happen as suddenly, matter-of-factly, have happened, somewhere in that white space between the paragraph you are reading and the one you just finished. She is the most elusive stylist going—I know of one celebrated writer who drew shapes for each section of a Munro story hoping that way to discover something of their secret—and the most satisfying. Munro is eighty-one years old and claims that this will be her last book.Dear Life is so full of momentum that this does not seem possible.
In “To Reach Japan,” a young wife and mother named Greta tells us of her husband’s escape from Soviet Czechoslovakia as a child: he was carried over some mountains, whose name Greta can never remember, by his mother.
“I’ve read stories like that,” Greta said, when Peter first told her about this. She explained how in the stories the baby would start to cry and invariably had to be smothered or strangled so that the noise did not endanger the whole illegal party.
There is no “invariably” in an Alice Munro story. Even when she is working with a character or theme or relationship she has worked with before, especially when she does, she makes us aware of the variable, the infinite variations life can throw at themes and landscapes and towns and girls and women and men and boys, the chance that propels every story. “In Leaving Maverley,” a night watchman named Ray is asked to walk a girl home from the movie theater where she works on Saturday nights. Leah is the ticket taker, but she’s from such a strict religious family that she’s not allowed to watch the movies or even listen to the dialogue. When she asks Ray why the audience was laughing one night,
He said that he didn’t get too involved in the movies, seeing them as he did, in bits and pieces. He seldom followed the plots.
“Plots,” she said.
He had to tell her what that meant—that there were stories being told.
Munro’s verb tenses are more varied and more involved in her storytelling than most writers’ are. It is part of what makes her stories so alive, so organic in feeling. She doesn’t say that the movies tell a story. She says stories are being told, and the continuous verb tense and passive voice bestow power and authority on the act of narrative itself. This sense of being caught up in the storytelling only adds to the great internal locomotion within Munro’s tales. Reading a single Munro story, or reading volume to volume to volume, one has the feeling not so much of following along, but of being miraculously included as, continuous and elementary, the story rolls onward.
And yet Munro sometimes seems to question the very validity of stories. Her characters, whether suburban housewives in Vancouver or farmers in rural Huron County or clerks in small-town offices, are suspicious of fiction, dismissing it as make-believe. “In the old days,” begins “Leaving Maverly,” “when there was a movie theater in every town there was one in this town, too, in Maverly, and it was called the Capital, as such theaters often were.” An old-fashioned, homey image—nothing irregular, not even the name, and anyway it was such a long time ago. The sentence itself is reassuring, the cadences beautiful and floating, balanced, rhythmic. The movie stories, Ray tells Leah, “were often about crooks and innocent people” and took place in nightclubs or with actors singing on mountaintops or wearing the costumes of the past or cavorting with jungle animals brought out from the zoo. But they are just stories, he says:
People getting up from being murdered in various ways the moment the camera was off them. Alive and well, though you had just seen them shot or on the executioner’s block with their heads rolling in a basket.
And the real story here turns out to be not at all like those on the movie screen or Ray’s descriptions of them but one longer and odder, frayed and unresolvable. Leah escapes the town by running off with the minister’s son, a saxophone player. Ray abandons the town in order to be near his wife, who becomes terminally ill, in the hospital in the city. Years pass, the Seventies are in full swing, for Leah there is more scandal (she leaves the minister’s son for a minister who eventually leaves her for another minister), but for Ray there is just the wife he loves, unconscious in a hospital bed. When she dies, “what he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.”
The narrative threads are knotted with social change and loyalty and disloyalty, with a censorious dying town and shallow cosmopolitan liveliness, with every variety of loss. Loss is Munro’s subject. Distance provides a kind of grammar. She narrates from a careful remove, her command as the storyteller more important than intimacy. But what is curious and glorious and unlikely is that this distance never makes her characters emotionally remote. In fact, it allows us to move in closer to them than we could if they were the kind of aggressively personal characters we associate with intimate narrative.
In “Haven,” for example, Munro tells a seemingly simple story—of an oppressively narrow husband, a doctor, and his devoted submissive wife who recklessly defies him in a small but resonant way—from the point of view of their young niece, staying with them while her parents are in Ghana. The distance between the progressively brought-up girl and her strictly conventional relatives is there from the start. In addition, the niece is looking back to this episode, which took place in the Seventies, from the present day. But to create an even greater remove, Munro tells the story in a seemingly offhand conditional voice:
It was probably then that my aunt picked up her fork and began to eat. She would have waited until the bristling was over. This may have been out of habit…. What could dinner have been? I want to say curry, but maybe that’s because my father didn’t like curry…. Whatever Aunt Dawn had served, it wouldn’t have been a deliberate provocation…. I don’t know how much my aunt revealed to the neighbors…. She did, I’m sure, explain that the doctor could not be present on that evening, but she would never have gone so far as to tell them that the gathering was to be kept a secret from him…. She must have wondered…. She would have indicated…. Hard to say…. She must have gone around dazed…. I can’t remember…. I can’t pay attention…. I think I remember….
What Munro has done with this distancing, what she does so powerfully in all her work, is not to withdraw us from her characters or her characters from us, but to create room around them: room for sympathy. They are not always easy to sympathize with, either. The inhabitants of Munro’s stories are troubled, peculiar, pinched, violent, prideful, ignorant, envious, meddling, superior—as imperfect as human beings get. She does not hold back in revealing the wormy crawling activity beneath the rocks of small-town life, the disgust with anyone different or ambitious or literary or imaginative or, worse yet, all these and female, too. But Munro, like some brisk clear wind, reveals the errors and evils and simultaneously blows away our own initially judgmental reaction.
In “Haven” the niece gradually stops sending sarcastic descriptions of her aunt and uncle to her parents in Ghana, finding their situation more and more complicated the longer she stays with them. So do we. And it is partly those conditional verbs, full of questions and possible errors of judgment, full of the possibility of alternate explanations, that have allowed us the freedom of empathy. It is hard to be harsh and judgmental in the conditional. And all of human life, Munro tells us, is lived in that ineffable tense.
There is a surprising sense of possibility everywhere in Dear Life that is almost optimistic. Even in “Leaving Maverly,” a tragic spinning out of seemingly meaningless lives, of leaving a small town and ending up nowhere, Munro leaves a crack of light. The heavy “lack” Ray felt when his wife died was one he “supposed” would go on forever. The reader is left with the possibility, however slight, that he is wrong.
Many of Munro’s stories, and three in this collection, involve trains, befitting a writer who writes so often of escape, of unforeseen encounters, and of alienation. On the train, her characters are compartmentalized, literally, from real life, separated from their pasts, on the way to the future—or back again. In one of the stories, which is called “Train,” Jackson, returning from the war, never makes it home to his fiancée. He jumps off the train, instead, into a field a few stops from home:
Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation…. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on a train and just looking out the window…. A sense of being watched by things you didn’t know about. Of being a disturbance. Life around coming to some conclusions about you from vantage points you couldn’t see.
His response to just the song of birds in the trees and the sound of wind rattling their leaves is taut with the self-conscious, solipsistic nature of alienation. And then this:
Over the hill came a box on wheels, being pulled by two quite small horses…. And in the box sat a half dozen or so little men. All dressed in black, with proper black hats on their heads.
The sound was coming from them. It was singing. Discreet high-pitched little voices, as sweet as could be. They never looked at him as they went by.
Jackson experiences the quaint horse-drawn cart, the Mennonite children’s tinkling voices, and the clip-clop of tiny pony hooves as bizarre, chilling. He thinks they are dwarfs.
One of Munro’s most charming characters, a woman some years older than Jackson, living in benignly shabby eccentricity, owns the farm where he has landed. The story progresses through years of his aloof, neutral amiability and her good-humored, neutral amiability, the two of them living together in a symbiotic asexual coupling, two misfits comfortably arranged. Time passes, jumps like a spark between paragraphs, barely noted by either Jackson or Belle, as if they were in a fairy tale, complete with dwarfs and Belle, the Sleeping Beauty. It is in fact only when Belle wakes up, after she has gone to Toronto to the hospital to have a tumor removed, after she has awakened cured and giddy and slightly drugged, after she tells Jackson a personal, intimate story she has never told anyone before, that the fairy tale ends. Belle has broken the spell.
That might be where a more conventional short story would end, but this one reels forward, aimless and driven at the same time, like Jackson’s life. He abandons Belle and the farm just as he did his fiancée and hometown, and then abandons that new life, too, all beginning with a long walk away from the hospital, “just waiting for the inevitable turn he had been expecting, to take him back to where he’d come from.” The spot where Jackson jumped off the train was determined by chance. His decision to stay there with Belle was arbitrary, the intimacy with Belle as unlikely as a cart of singing dwarfs in bowlers. But it is the inevitability of chance that propels so many of Munro’s stories.
In “To Reach Japan,” Greta, a poet, rather dreamily yet craftily takes the train from Vancouver to Toronto on the off-chance she might get together with a man she had met once at a literary party, a grim, insular, hostile gathering of egoism and sycophantish snobbery, as only a literary party can be:
She thought that when she went with Peter to an engineer’s party, the atmosphere was pleasant though the talk was boring. That was because everybody had their importance fixed and settled at least for the time being. Here nobody was safe. Judgment might be passed behind backs, even on the known and published. An air of cleverness or nerves obtained, no matter who you were.
Thirstily downing several glasses of what she thinks is lemonade, Greta winds up drunk, happily sitting on the floor with her uncomfortable shoes off until a man helps her up and drives her home. There is a moment when he wants to kiss her and doesn’t. He lives in Toronto, is just visiting. A chance encounter, a muted, attenuated passion, a physical separation: but this is not A Brief Encounter, it is an Alice Munro story. When a chance to housesit for a friend in Toronto turns up, Greta takes it. And sends him this unsigned note, the closest thing to a poem she has written in a long time:
Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle— And hoping It will reach Japan.
One of the astonishing aspects of Munro’s work is how similar, how recognizable, so many components of her stories are, and yet how vital and new and essential they become within each story. She seems to be embarked on a journey of constant adaptation, as if she were her own species. It’s one of the qualities that give her work an almost epic quality.
Another is the ease with which her plots seem to carve their own intricate and far-reaching designs. In “To Reach Japan,” for example, the man from Toronto fades into the background as the train makes its way toward that city. Greta and her daughter Katy make friends with two young actors, one of whom Greta ends up sleeping with. She’s left Katy in her compartment, asleep, the curtain carefully buttoned closed. When she leaves the actor’s berth, she is exhilarated, “weak, shocked, but buoyant, like some gladiator—she actually thought this out and smiled at it—after a session in the arena.” And then, back to compartment, where the unthinkable has happened: Katy is gone.
The description of Greta’s reaction is quick, direct, and harrowing, beginning with, simply, “She went crazy.” She finally finds Katy in the cold, noisy area between two cars, “not crying, not complaining, as if she was just to sit there forever and there was to be no explanation offered to her, no hope.”
The train, cut off from real life, slicing through the landscape, gives Greta the freedom to seek one lover and to find another even before she reaches Toronto. She is, as in an old melodrama, punished by losing her daughter on the train. And even when she finds her, the punishment lingers, a curse on a woman who has dared to let her mind wander toward art, as well as love, toward “the work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life,” which often kept her attention away from Katy. “Now, because of the picture in her head of Katy alone, Katy sitting there amid the metal clatter between the cars—that was something else she, Katy’s mother, was going to have to give up.”
Munro mentions in this story how hard it is to describe to younger people the atmosphere before feminism, the dismay at a woman’s ambition, the restrictions on her activity. Women sometimes seem to be gasping for breath in her stories, whether they are being choked by the expectations for a suburban housewife or for a little girl in a remote town who is suddenly deemed too old to decently ride a bicycle in public. Katy’s mother, like so many of Munro’s women, has taken an enormous, reckless chance, and the gods seem to have lined up with provincial society against her. Until, chastened by Katy’s narrow escape, Greta and Katy get off the train in Toronto. The freshly attentive mother gives a careful, simple explanation of what will come next to the child: the tunnel, the escalator, the taxi, the new house. And then, someone “took hold of Greta, and kissed her for the first time, in a determined and celebratory way.”
Katy lets go of her hand, but she doesn’t try to run away. Or escape. And in this story, the wailing child does not have to be smothered to save the group escaping over the mountain: “She just stood waiting for whatever had to come next.”
In Dear Life, Munro’s outlook is too matter-of-fact to be called optimism. She does not suggest that everything will turn out well, just that it will turn, and in ways we can’t predict. But there is also an appreciation, an affection almost, for the random twists of life’s narrative. In one lovely story in this volume, entitled “Pride,” she turns her attention to the lives of two sad, lonely people moving into a sad, lonely, alienated old age in a town they no longer recognize, that no longer belongs to them. The narrator is a man with a harelip, a physical deformity that has deformed his entire life. He is nameless in this story, lives with his mother, and has cut himself off from any kind of friendship in order to escape pity, until, accidently, passively, he drifts into a friendship with a woman named Oneida.
“I must have run into Oneida during those years, and kept track of her life,” he says of the 1940s.
I would have had to. Her father died right before VE-day, mixing up the funeral with the celebrations in an awkward way. The same for my mother’s, which occurred the following summer, just when everybody heard about the atomic bomb. My mother did die more startingly and publicly, at work, just after she said, “I’m going to have to sit down.”
Oneida is the daughter of the most prominent man in town, the banker. She knows the narrator slightly, the way one does in a small town; and rather arbitrarily—he is a bookkeeper, she sees him on the street—asks his advice about selling her house. She is aimless, hapless, acting on whims, and as time passes she is more and more drawn to the narrator, who is an unchanging bit of her past. She blithely ignores his advice, selling her house at a pitifully low price to a man who says he wants his children to grow up there but in fact tears it down to build an apartment building. And as aimlessly as she sells it, she moves into the top floor of the apartment building. She likes the view, her view.
Oneida, just as casually, begins to appear at the narrator’s house in the evenings, and they drift into a pattern of eating dinner together in the living room watching television. When he gets ill, Oneida stays there and nurses him back to health, then suggests she might as well move in. It seems an obvious solution to the reader, it is where the story is leading. But Munro is not following the story, she is telling it, and the narrator’s wonderfully characteristic yet utterly unpredictable response is to put the house he’s lived in since birth up for sale the next day.
On moving day, Oneida appears for an impersonal, desultory, slightly depressing conversation about very little, considering how long they’ve known each other. Then, suddenly, she jumps up—she’s seen something out the window, an old birdbath:
It was full of birds. Black-and-white, dashing up a storm.
Not birds. Something larger than robins, smaller than crows.
Skunks. Baby skunks. The two of them stand side by side, each watching from the vantage point of their disappointed lives:
But how beautiful. Flashing and dancing….
While we watched, they lifted themselves up one by one and left the water and proceeded to walk across the yard, swiftly but in a straight diagonal line. As if they were proud of themselves but discreet. Five of them.
“My Lord,” said Oneida. “In town.”
…We were as glad as we could be.
The limitations of the narrator and of Oneida, the plodding sameness of his life, the aimlessness of Oneida’s—all this is allowed to take on a kind of dignity, like those five glorious skunks flashing in the water. No other living writer is as capable of exposing the dreariness of a life, but what makes Munro’s work so heartbreaking is that there is no person, however stunted, who we’re able to dismiss, no landscape, however barren, that we can skip. “But how beautiful!” A hapless, spoiled spinster, a pinched and damaged recluse, and five baby skunks in the sunlight.
Munro’s compassion fills the spaces between characters like air, fills the silences, the distances with an expansive, elemental inevitability. There is ample room for odd behavior in Munro’s world, room that world may not always have afforded her. She affords this generosity toward her own life, however, explicitly in the four pieces at the end of the book, the last of which is called “Dear Life.” Munro says these pieces are not stories and not quite autobiographical either. The details of a life already familiar to us through her fiction, a life we have observed intimately through the stories, are then presented: the unsuccessful fox farm she grew up on, the beatings described so unforgettably in The Beggars Maid, her mother’s illness:
You would think that this was just too much. The business gone, my mother’s health going. It wouldn’t do in fiction. But the strange thing is that I don’t remember that time as unhappy…. Against several odds, I believed myself a lucky person.
Of course it has “done” in fiction, in Munro’s particular fiction. Her stories feel like the stories people would tell, if only they were Alice Munro. They have the fantastic inevitability of fables, the profundity of myths, the sudden turns of fairy tales; the rhythm and authority of a story told out loud, repeated, passed on, altered. In Dear Life, the story and the collection named for it, there is everything we have come to recognize in an Alice Munro story and long to recognize as many more times as Alice Munro will grace us with one.
Uhrichsville, OH: Imagine how much space 7 million books would occupy. Thats the visual that comes to mindperhaps a mega churchful of booksat the announcement by Barbour Publishing that author Wanda E. Brunstetter has surpassed the 7 million mark in book sales.
What makes Brunstetters latest accomplishment even more significant is that it was a little more than a year ago that she celebrated the 6 million mark. One million more books sold in about a yearno wonder the Yakima, Wash., authors novels have appeared on such bestseller lists as the New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, CBA, ECPAand CBD.
Brunstetter has won the Retailers Choice Award, and many of her books have been Picks of the Week at CBD. Her 2013 sales have been boosted by her six-book Discovery Saga, as well as her second full-length novel about an Amish quilting class in Indiana, Augusts The Tattered Quilt.With connections to the Amish community through her family heritage, Brunstetter enjoys writing her award-winning Amish bestsellers, because they portray a simpler, more peaceful life and convey the strong family values she holds dear.
Brunstetter and her husband enjoy visiting Amish settlements throughout the country. They recently returned from Bird-in-Hand, Penn., where the author met readers at signings celebrating performances of Half-Stitched the Musical.The play is based on Brunstetters 2012 novel, The Half-Stitched Amish Quilting Club, a prequel to The Tattered Quilt.
ABOUT THE AUTHOUR
Wanda E. Brunstetter
Genres:
Amish
,
Historical
,
Romance
Award-winning, bestselling author, Wanda E. Brunstetter became fascinated with the Amish way of life when she first visited her husband’s Mennonite relatives living in Pennsylvania. Wanda and her husband, Richard, live in Washington State but take every opportunity to visit Amish settlements throughout the States, where they have several Amish friends.
A loud bang above made me look up and it was just in time to see the luggage compartment cave in, falling on our heads. The screams were unbearable, the anguish unspeakable and the mournful wail of a young mother behind me were sounds etched in my memory till eternity.
Men and women of honor who boarded this ill-fated plane an hour ago luxuriously attired with all the confidence and pride of success now look pitiable. Their bodies mangled beyond recognition by the broken machine, their branded clothing burnt into rags barely hanging on the remaining pieces of their bodies. I listened as they screamed in terror, their horror filled eyes darting about as if expecting help to come from somewhere.
A body was violently thrown forward from the back seat as the tail caught fire. The passenger was already dead. In the mist of all the chaos, I looked at the victim and realized it is the gentleman who said we should pray shortly before the aircraft took off. I was among those who ignored him. I couldn’t help but notice the peace on his pale face. In a normal circumstance, he could be mistaken to be asleep. Human parts flew all over as the plane collapsed and caught fire. A limb that had ripped off the owner fell on me and I almost blanked out from nausea.
The realization that the end had come made the passengers go beserk . Someone had a seizure and died instantly. Screams of ‘’Jesus help me’’, muhammed, allah filled the air. As we all waited for the end, someone gripped my shoulder and I looked to see the lady whose legs caught the attention of all the males on board. She has the most beautiful toned, long, slim legs I ever set my eyes on.
Now, she was a sight to behold. One of the legs had been ripped off when the plane crashed into the first building as she sat by the window. She was asking me something. I thought I heard her say ‘’Pray for me’’ It was too late as another impact from the plane throw her against the door, her neck snapped and broke.
The plane hit something huge, and everything went black. I heard nothing again. It is like being buried alive. I couldn’t feel any part of my body, couldn’t move, everything was dark around me. The screams, noise and wails of other dying passengers stopped. All I had was my thought. I could still think and remember scenes from the past. Oh God, why does it have to end this way? Barely an hour ago, I had a beautiful life ahead of me filled with promises of a bright future; nobody knew the end was just by the corner.
Where will I end up Lord? I don’t want to end up in hell. I was not a bad guy, but I never served the Lord in a meaningful way either. I only attend church to network for business contacts and never gave a thought to anything spiritual. I had in my briefcase the signed copy of a contract worth several millions on dollars. It was the big break I chased all my adult years, but now to what end?
If only I took mum’s advice before she passed on ten years ago. She was a devout Christian woman and lived all her life in total devotion and obedience to the ways of the Lord. I tried to follow her path, as I was brought up to know the savior but later abandoned the way when it was becoming increasingly difficult to belong. I was advised by a pastor to be patient and wait for the Lord to bless me at his own time, but patience was not one of my virtues. I had to be like the Jones. I did want to serve the Lord after becoming wealthy. I even wanted to donate huge money for my church building project, but that will never be again forever. The owner of life has come for his possession.
‘’Have mercy on me Lord, forgive me for my stubbornness, give me the grace to enter into your kingdom and be with you forever. What am asking seemed big, but you are a merciful God’’
I mourned and prayed deep within me as I began to lose consciousness. I remember my beautiful wife and three kids at home. A deep pain wrenches my heart apart that I will never see them again. I wish I could have the opportunity to tell her to bring up our kids in the fear of the Lord so they won’t end up in the pit. That ageless biblical phrase suddenly came to my mind; ‘’what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and lose his soul’’ How true that is. All my material possessions meant nothing to me at the moment.
I spent my life chasing the shadows, worthless things that mean nothing at the other side of heavens. I could feel the darkness closing in on me and as I drew closer, a sense of foreboding filled me up. Suddenly I saw a shadow of something huge floating towards me. Oh L...............
Minutes after 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was snatched from her bedroom in the dead of night, a police cruiser idled by along a neighborhood street as she was forced to the ground at knife point. "Move and I will kill you!" her captor hissed.
It was one of several fleeting times Smart watched a rescue slip away during her nine-month ordeal, she recounts in "My Story," a 308-page book being released by St. Martin's Press on Monday.
She writes that she was so terrified of the street preacher who kidnapped her that when she was rescued by police in a Salt Lake City suburb in March 2003, she only reluctantly identified herself.
Between the heartbreak of missed chances, Smart writes, she was treated as a sex object by Brian David Mitchell and as a slave by his wife, Wanda Barzee. She says they denied her food and water for days at a time.
A U.S. attorney called it one of the kidnapping crimes of the century. Smart, a quiet, devout Mormon who played the harp and loved horses, vanished without a trace from her home high above Salt Lake City.
Smart, now 25, is married, living in Park City, finishing a music degree at Brigham Young University and traveling across the country giving speeches and doing advocacy work. She created the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to bring awareness to predatory crimes against children. For her, the book was another way to help bring nine months of brutality to a close.
"I want people to know that I'm happy in my life right now," Smart told The Associated Press. "I also, even more so, want to reach out to people who might not be in a good situation. Maybe they're in a situation that was similar to the one that I was in."
Smart said she hopes the book, which The AP received in advance of its release from the publisher, will help other victims know that it's possible to be happy and move forward with their lives and will shed some light on what was going through her head during what she called "nine months of hell."
Her account was written with help from Chris Stewart, a Utah congressman who has authored books with religious and patriotic themes.
Smart says she doesn't care to understand Mitchell, yet her book opens a window on his personality. He was a downtown Salt Lake City fixture in a robe and sandals who first laid a crooked eye on Smart when her mother offered the man $5 and work at the family home.
At that moment, he resolved to take her as the second of a hoped-for five wives, he later told Smart.
Smart says Mitchell believed that anything in the world was his for the taking, and that he was a man who never cared for anyone even as he ranted about God. Smart calls him a "manipulative, antisocial and narcissistic pedophile."
Against that backdrop, the book chronicles a series of near-rescues, notably by a homicide detective who questioned Mitchell at a downtown Salt Lake City library. From under a table, Barzee clamped "iron" fingers into Smart's thigh. Smart, disguised in a dirty robe and face veil, remained silent as she remembered the couple's repeated threats to kill her family if she tried to save herself.
Her book reveals another near-rescue. Only days into the kidnapping, a helicopter hovered over the makeshift camp in the mountains just 5 miles from Smart's home where she was kept tethered to trees by steel cables.
She was forced inside a tent as the wash of the helicopter's rotors bent trees around them. After an eternal minute, she watched the helicopter slowly glide away.
It never returned. Mitchell took it as another favorable sign from God.
"Why didn't I cry out for help?" Smart reflects. The answer "comes down to fear."
The young girl believed Mitchell invincible. Despite years of misdeeds, he had never served more than a few days in jail.
After Smart's rescue, Mitchell wheedled his way through state courts for more than six years, leaving them hopelessly bogged down in hearings over his mental competence. Federal prosecutors took over, and a judge ruled Mitchell was faking mental illness.
Mitchell is serving two life terms after he was sentenced in 2011. A year earlier, Barzee was given 15 years for her role in Smart's kidnapping and sexual assault.
Mitchell managed to convince some psychiatrists he was insane. He shouted hymns and songs in court and ordered judges to "repent." Smart described a moment in his federal trial when Mitchell feigned collapse, with paramedics rushing into court.
Between gasps and moans on a gurney, Mitchell locked eyes with Smart for the first time in years. He offered an "evil grin" to show he could still control others, she writes. "I returned his cold stare, never looking away."
It was outside San Diego, where Mitchell took Barzee and Smart for winter at a homeless camp, that Smart devised a plan for freedom. She convinced Mitchell that God intended them to return to Salt Lake City.
On their arrival outside the city, police stopped the odd-looking trio, a middle-aged couple and young girl wearing filthy clothes, a gray wig and dark sunglasses, walking along a major metro street. Smart writes that before she identified herself, police seemed to know they had found her, asking, "Are you Elizabeth Smarthttp://trulife-books.blogspot.com/2013/10/truelife-book-storythe-elizabeth-smart.html
A rough
diamond is a story about how good can come out of something bad, how beauty can
come out of ashes, and how a life can be miraculously transformed in spite of a
supposed tragedy. Even though Sharon died, the victory is in the fact that she
lived her life to the full; she fulfilled the very purpose for which she was
born and left footprints in the sound of life.
After Sharon’s passing, it was strongly impressed in
my heart to write her story. I wanted the world to read her story. Perhaps,
some will be lifted out of depression and come to find joy in life again;
having courage to start afresh and do more in spite of what life has thrown at
them. Some of us may never discover the precious diamond within us until we
face a big mountain, a challenge, a tragedy that appears larger than life
itself.
God has a purpose in every problem. He uses problems
to draw us closer to him. Your most profound intimate experience of worship
with God will likely be during the darkest period of your life; when the pain
is most, when you run out of options, when there is no other alternative. That
is when we pray our most authentic and heartfelt prayer of dedication.
Joni Eareckson Tada notes, “When life is rosy, we
may slide by with knowing about Jesus, with imitating and quoting him. Only in
suffering do we know him. Rick Warren
wrote – Problems forces us to look to God and depend on him instead of ourselves. We will never know that God is all we need
until God is all we‘ve got. According to him, No matter the cause, nothing can
happen to us without the Lord’s will. Whatever happened to a Christian is
father filtered and he intends to use it for good. Because God is sovereign,
tragedies are just accidents in God’s good plan for us.
This book is not about HIV, though its effect on a
human body can be devastating on the soul of its victim. For those who are
living with HIV/AIDS. That is not the end of the world. You can live a happy
and resourceful life like Sharon did when she decided to look away from the tragedy that befell her. Till the end, she
was a happy and fulfilled woman. You can be and do anything you want to if you
believe.
For friends and relatives of those living with
HIV/AIDS, the worst thing you can do is reject and treat them with disdain. In
so doing, you are sending them to an early grave as that can be emotionally
unbearable. They need a daily dose of
affection, love and approval. I must emphasize that hugging and displaying your
affection towards an infected person will not make you infected.
To those who have had to endure a terrible tragedy or loss, you can choose to
either wallow in self-pity or turn the situation around. You have to choose
between allowing the situation drag you down or you rise above the painful
experience. It is a choice only you have to make. The whole of creation backs
whatever decision you make. I encourage you to make a silver lining around the
cloud of your life. Madame Guyon said that it is the fire of suffering that
brings forth the gold of godliness.
Also, from this story, we discover that death is not
the end of human existence. The body dies and decays, but the soul of man lives
on in eternity. One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be the end of
my body-- but not the end of me.
I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going
to spend trillions of years in eternity. This is the warm-up act - the dress
rehearsal. God wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in
eternity. We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life
is not going to make sense. Life is a series of problems: you are in one now,
you are just coming out of one, or you are getting ready to go into another
one. The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than
your comfort; God is more interested in making your life holy than he is in
making your life happy. We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but that is
not the goal of life. The goal is to grow in character, in Christ likeness.
WATCH out for the release of our long awaited christain fiction classic about Sharon Mathews.
Sharon’s
life was at its fullest or so it seemed. She had one of the best paying jobs, a
high flyer; climbing the career ladder at a pace most people could only
imagine. Blessed with toys typical of the fast-paced life, state of the art
automobiles, jetting from one city to another on vacation, and been courted by
the most eligible bachelor at work. What
more can a girl possibly ask for?
This was Sharon’s
life until a sleeping beast from the past rose and dealt her an eternal wound.
Would she recover from it?
From this
classic piece, we will see how a life can be beautifully remolded and
transformed by tragedy. How good can come out of a bad occurrence and how the
human spirit through faith in God can rise above every conceivable challenge of
life.
Follow me as I recount the story of Sharon Mathews...
