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A review by sarah_b
One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty
5.0
In One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), Eudora Welty warmly invites the reader into a glimpse of her childhood and the events that shaped her into a writer. Welty was born in 1909, and she lived in Jackson, Mississippi, until she went to New York to actively pursue her writing career. Using divine description, Welty reveals a collection of simple moments that guided her journey to become a writer.
Because I had never read anything by Eudora Welty, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up One Writer’s Beginnings. At best, when I turned to the first page, I anticipated a creative retelling of Welty’s childhood in the early 1900s. What I didn’t expect was the immediate, refreshing desire to curl up in a chair illuminated in dim lamplight and be perfectly content to read deep into the night. In many ways, settling into this memoir felt like coming home. Welty’s writing style gives the memoir an airy atmosphere of nostalgia and tenderness.
Welty explains that her love for reading, writing, and stories began early, even when she was still a child. She completely captures the essence of a child’s perspective toward books when she writes, “It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass” (Welty 1984, 5). As children, we had little conception of what is created and what is already existent. We guilelessly assumed that shelter and sustenance had always been, the same way that mountains and rivers have always existed. But as we grew older, we noticed the surrounding world as something that Someone had carefully carved into the earth for a specific purpose. One Writer’s Beginnings focuses on Welty’s understanding of how incidences in her life existed for the purpose of her learning how to effectively use her gift for writing.
Welty writes through an analytical lens. Her memoir doesn’t rely upon facts and figures, but on the little details ordinarily missed by those who don’t look as closely at the world around them. And Welty finds those moments and shares them with the reader. She has the gift to perceive how circumstances have the power to unearth parts of humans that they hadn’t previously recognized. Welty’s mother once ran into their burning house to save her collection of Dickens novels. This courageous action sparks Welty to contemplate whether she “would go through fire and water for it as my mother had done for Charles Dickens” (Welty 1984, 9). Throughout this memoir, Welty unveils qualities in her mother that she later discovered within her own spirit. I enjoyed these parallels between mother and daughter because they compelled me to consider my own relationship with my mother and how we are alike.
Although Welty effectively uses description, she sometimes includes too much of her family’s history. The backgrounds of her parents and grandparents somewhat delay the story because the reader expects to read only of what Eudora Welty thinks, not what her grandfather may have said twenty years before. Nonetheless, you will enjoy the descriptions. Welty writes these little details in a way that she would tell someone who’s just moved into town, someone who doesn’t yet know who’s related to whom, or how they came to be, or how things used to be.
During these detours, I felt temporarily lost, but once Welty ties the threads together, I realized how those roundabout additions develop the story even further. Because Welty is a Southern writer, she is more apt to take long, leisurely strolls in the garden of the past and lackadaisically pick the stories one by one that she wants to tell. But each story that Welty shares is dusted with meaning that she relates to being a writer. By the end of the memoir, you will be pleasantly surprised.
When Welty wrote One Writer’s Beginnings, she was in her seventies, and somehow her life may have seemed suddenly clearer when she viewed it in hindsight. She says, “Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists” (Welty 1984, 90). Sprinkled throughout the memoir are moments that Welty has looked back on and pondered, at last noticing the connection between the scattered, frenzied moments that life seemed to toss at her feet. Those moments always seem to tie back to her love for writing.
In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty reflects on what being a writer means to her. She tenderly wrote this memoir using moments from her childhood that shaped her into the successful Southern writer that she became. Writers will want to read this memoir to gather a fresh perspective from a seasoned, successful writer. Teachers also will benefit from reading a book like this that would better equip them to teach amateur writers. Even though Welty’s walks in the past can be rather long, this book is still an engaging, delightful read. By the end of One Writer’s Beginnings, you will feel as if you had just had spent the evening talking to Eudora Welty and are parting ways as the closest of friends.
Because I had never read anything by Eudora Welty, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up One Writer’s Beginnings. At best, when I turned to the first page, I anticipated a creative retelling of Welty’s childhood in the early 1900s. What I didn’t expect was the immediate, refreshing desire to curl up in a chair illuminated in dim lamplight and be perfectly content to read deep into the night. In many ways, settling into this memoir felt like coming home. Welty’s writing style gives the memoir an airy atmosphere of nostalgia and tenderness.
Welty explains that her love for reading, writing, and stories began early, even when she was still a child. She completely captures the essence of a child’s perspective toward books when she writes, “It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass” (Welty 1984, 5). As children, we had little conception of what is created and what is already existent. We guilelessly assumed that shelter and sustenance had always been, the same way that mountains and rivers have always existed. But as we grew older, we noticed the surrounding world as something that Someone had carefully carved into the earth for a specific purpose. One Writer’s Beginnings focuses on Welty’s understanding of how incidences in her life existed for the purpose of her learning how to effectively use her gift for writing.
Welty writes through an analytical lens. Her memoir doesn’t rely upon facts and figures, but on the little details ordinarily missed by those who don’t look as closely at the world around them. And Welty finds those moments and shares them with the reader. She has the gift to perceive how circumstances have the power to unearth parts of humans that they hadn’t previously recognized. Welty’s mother once ran into their burning house to save her collection of Dickens novels. This courageous action sparks Welty to contemplate whether she “would go through fire and water for it as my mother had done for Charles Dickens” (Welty 1984, 9). Throughout this memoir, Welty unveils qualities in her mother that she later discovered within her own spirit. I enjoyed these parallels between mother and daughter because they compelled me to consider my own relationship with my mother and how we are alike.
Although Welty effectively uses description, she sometimes includes too much of her family’s history. The backgrounds of her parents and grandparents somewhat delay the story because the reader expects to read only of what Eudora Welty thinks, not what her grandfather may have said twenty years before. Nonetheless, you will enjoy the descriptions. Welty writes these little details in a way that she would tell someone who’s just moved into town, someone who doesn’t yet know who’s related to whom, or how they came to be, or how things used to be.
During these detours, I felt temporarily lost, but once Welty ties the threads together, I realized how those roundabout additions develop the story even further. Because Welty is a Southern writer, she is more apt to take long, leisurely strolls in the garden of the past and lackadaisically pick the stories one by one that she wants to tell. But each story that Welty shares is dusted with meaning that she relates to being a writer. By the end of the memoir, you will be pleasantly surprised.
When Welty wrote One Writer’s Beginnings, she was in her seventies, and somehow her life may have seemed suddenly clearer when she viewed it in hindsight. She says, “Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists” (Welty 1984, 90). Sprinkled throughout the memoir are moments that Welty has looked back on and pondered, at last noticing the connection between the scattered, frenzied moments that life seemed to toss at her feet. Those moments always seem to tie back to her love for writing.
In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty reflects on what being a writer means to her. She tenderly wrote this memoir using moments from her childhood that shaped her into the successful Southern writer that she became. Writers will want to read this memoir to gather a fresh perspective from a seasoned, successful writer. Teachers also will benefit from reading a book like this that would better equip them to teach amateur writers. Even though Welty’s walks in the past can be rather long, this book is still an engaging, delightful read. By the end of One Writer’s Beginnings, you will feel as if you had just had spent the evening talking to Eudora Welty and are parting ways as the closest of friends.