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My Life As Laura: How I Searched For Laura Ingalls Wilder And Found Myself (2011)

by Kelly Kathleen Ferguson(Favorite Author)

3.79 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1935708449 (ISBN13: 9781935708445)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Press 53

review 1: I met Kelly Kathleen Ferguson when she did a reading and some guest teaching at Penn State Harrisburg, where I teach. She showed up to the reading in that wonderful Laura dress, had the audience rolling with laughter with just about every line, and was all-around great. I'm happy to say her book is five stars, all the way, thanks to the skewed humor and playful tone, as well as the general concept of the whole project. Ferguson is confident and clever with snarky wordplay ("Laurafan" is awesome), and she's phrased her sentences in a lighthearted, conversational style. The memoir is not all glib, however. There are serious assessments of all the decisions women have to make, from Laura's decisions out on the prairie(s), to Ferguson's almost-midlife-crisis reckoning with two... more decades of waitressing, to scholarly arguments about Laura's daughter's role in the authorship of the famous books (or Books, as Ferguson puts it). I was also pleased at the fairly long discussion of the one-time PBS reality show, Frontier House, which I watched and had since assumed that no one else on the planet had watched. But Kelly Kathleen Ferguson had! Yay! Great book, great read.
review 2: When I was a little kid, I basically learned to read because mom read the Little House books to us every night- we got read other books, plenty of them, but mom would run her finger along the sentences and every now and then stop and help me sound something out, and keep going. I LOVE those books. I wrote reports about Laura Ingalls Wilder in grade school; in our "what would you do with a time machine" essay I proposed to go back in time to hang out with LIW, and then bring her back to my present to show her what the future holds, and see what she thought. I would still do this in a heartbeat. Oh, and I still have the little bonnet and skirt I wore for a couple different pioneer day type parades and costumes.When I moved into SE Portland, one of the neighbors also adored LIW and had actually made a pilgrimage to various sites. He called LIW fans "bonnetheads." I may not be the most rabid bonnethead, but I would consider myself one nonetheless.Ms. Ferguson uses the term "Laurafan(s)" which is fine, but this book is about finding herself through retracing Laura's footsteps. Going on a pilgrimage, basically. I'm entranced.I want to do the route SO BAD. And while I haven't known a couple things mentioned in the book so far, there's other things I did know (for instance that Ma & Pa spent the rest of their lives in town, not on the homestead; Laura & Manly weren't the most successful of farmers; Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's daughter, at the very least organized and edited her mother's writings, at the most ghost-wrote/co-authored the books). I want a dress and a bonnet, and I want to see the sad little tourist traps Laura's past homes have become.I.Love.This.Book. I find it wry and casual, but not flippant. I can relate not only to the subject matter but to the author herself and her non-Laura troubles (even if I'm only 32, there's still that whole "life passed by" existential angst going on). I'd totally hang out with the author. I'd totally go on this pilgrimage myself. In fact, now I desperately want to... I might get a map and start plotting it out, even. I love it to bits. less

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