Life Stories

Earlier this year I read the book The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant. I enjoyed how the protagonist, Addie, is an elderly woman looking back on her life and telling her own life story. She begins her tale when her granddaughter asks her how she became the woman she is today. The story moves at a quick pace, moving through history quickly as you enjoy the highlights of Addie’s interesting life.

This week, when trying to find my next read, I kept thinking about how much I enjoyed this book and I thought I would see if I could find something similar. Below are a few titles with a similar concept, an older woman reminiscing in old age about her life. If you enjoyed The Boston Girl as much as I did, you might enjoy these as well.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

“‘It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon.’ This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family--their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog--is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them, and the fate of the house so lovingly built by Red's father." publisher.

Keeper of Tides by Beatrice MacNeil

“At age ninety-two, Ivadoile Spears is in the grip of early dementia. Alone except for a cat named Rose and an old cedar box filled with photographs, Ivadoile is stubbornly set on living out her remaining years in the now-vacant Tides Inn on Cape Breton Island. The only child of cold and withdrawn parents and widowed by the age of twenty-eight, a younger Ivadoile turned the Tides Inn into a retreat for the broken-spirited. But she had not been prepared for Ambrose Kane – a southerner who entered, bringing a cold wind in his dirty shirt.” publisher.

The Deception of Livvy Higgs by Donna Morrissey

“For two traumatic days, Livvy Higgs is besieged by a series of small heart attacks while the ghost of her younger self leads her back through a past devastated by lies and secrets. The story opens in Halifax in 2009, travels back to the French Shore of Newfoundland during the mid-thirties and the heyday of the Maritime shipping industry, makes its way to wartorn Halifax during the battle of the Atlantic in World War II, then leaps ahead to the bedside of the elder Livvy. Tending to Livvy during her illness is her young next-door neighbour, Gen, a single mother, social-work student, and part-time drug dealer. Overnight, a violent scene embroils the two in each other's lives in a manner that will entwine them forever." publisher