Addie: A Memoir

Mary Lee Settle has the gift of making a character come to life with just a snippet of dialogue or description. The title character, Addie, is Ms. Settle's grandmother. She is a beautiful, very religious girl of simple country stock. Terribly abused by her first husband, she is hiding from him in a tree, when Jesus comes to her and tells her that she doesn't have a lick of sense and hasn't she ever heard of divorce! She finally does leave her husband for the wealthiest bachelor in town, a member of the landed gentry. As a divorced woman she is the scandal of the town and is never accepted by her new husband's family. Addie preseveres but like most of us never has an entirely easy life. Her story is just the starting point for this very engaging memoir about a Southern family.

What a gift Ms. Settle has! I could smell the wash on the line and dream in the back porch hammock. How wonderfully she evokes childhood with our oh so literal evaluations of the mysterious adults. To paraphrase e.e. cummings,--down we forget as up we grow--.but not so with Ms. Settle. The author draws sharply defined characters except for her own mother, interestinly enough. I sense a lot of unresolved feelings where her own mother is concerned; she's angry but tries to be fair. Addie, the grandmother, is in bright relief in contrast to the sharp and shadowy mother. Addie's self-righteous neighbor snorted over the misbehavior of a certain attractive young women. Addie's response: "I guess if you're not pretty, you're not tempted." says volumes.

This was a very special personal find for me. I can't wait to read other books written by Ms. Settle. An excellent writer, researcher, storyteller. I know Cedar Grove well, the town where Miss Addie lived. The history, for anyone in the Kanawha Valley, alone is worth checking out this book. But I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading a story that flows so well that you can't wait to read the next page. The account of history, the personal relationships, the writer's command of the written word...not one line was wasted... and it makes one think about their own grandparents and those before them. I loved the book. I will definitely read Ms. Settle's eariler books.

As one who has written several family histories, I am intrigued with the idea of writing autobiography and putting it into the family history by beginning a generation or so before birth of the subject. This makes for a firm foundational picture of what the subject is born into and must learn to live with. Mary Lee Settle did a masterful job of showing the conditioning that goes into survival in a West Virginia family based on the marriage of lower caste Addie, her grandmother, to upper caste Preston, her grandfather. It is a clear, telling picture of growing up in the grey area of the depression years.

Addie is the story that the author unearthed as she researched the life of her grandmother. Untangling fact from legend and downright lies, Ms. Settle tells the story of a woman trapped in an abusive marrage at the age of 15, who Jesus told to get divourse as she hid in a tree. Addie lived in Kanawha County W.Va.the story of her life, loves and defeats blended with the social history of the times and the coal fields of the region. The author writes with a wonderful use of the language that is tinged with a taste of the South. This is the sort of book we all would love to write about one of our grandmothers.