One of my very favorite things is sitting down and planning to read just a few chapters of a book, but getting so wrapped up in the story that I just end up finishing the whole thing. I’m not sure there’s a more satisfying feeling than emerging from the world of a book hours after you started knowing the time spent with it was entirely worth it.
That’s what happened to me yesterday with Melissa Coleman’s memoir This Life is In Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone. I got up around seven and went to the Farmers’ Market with my friend Erin (which was miserably cold!), came home and put my pj’s back on, then settled in my reading chair for a few chapters of the book before I had to get on with my day.
Four hours later I was finished with the book and left with no coherent sentences to explain how amazing it was, just a few words I jotted at the end of my notes: “Ominous, elegant, honest, relevant, evocative… just beautiful.”
This Life is In Your Hands is a memoir about Coleman’s childhood on the rugged coast of Maine in the 1970s with her parents, Eliot and Sue, who are part of the small movement of people leaving the comforts of society behind to homestead in the woods. The idealistic couple initially has personal and professional success at their endeavor — two beautiful daughters, recognition of their farming success from major national media, and a series of apprentices who come to the farm hoping to learn from the best.
However, the cost of the simple life — frenetic summers, long winters, and the daily pressure to get by — takes its toll on Sue and Eliot’s marriage. The dream of independence ends up with one daughter dead and the other abandoned by both parents. It’s a startlingly dark memoir about the cost of dreams.
