When I was a kid, I got hold of a volume of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, some of which made such an impression on my young mind that even after all these years I wanted to re-read them. One was called Grandma Called it Carnal, and it described the adventures of two orphaned children who go to live with their straightlaced but free-thinking Yankee grandmother after their mother dies. Charming, upbeat, and celebratory of the human spirit's ability to turn hardship into triumph - I remembered it for nearly four decades.
I managed to find the full version of the book (in hardback!) again a few months ago at ABE Books (great place -databases inventories of independent bookstores all over the country.) What a difference the full version makes. Grandma was charming, alright, and free-thinking, but also grotesquely exploitive of an unmarried daughter. The girls' Aunt Martha gave up several chances at happiness and did all of the backbreakingly hard work around the house without any assistance or mechanical aids. When they wanted to go to boarding school, Aunt Martha was the one who scraped together enough money to send them. The children themselves had to survive astonishing cruelty from the people around them. Not only did no one comfort them in any way at their loss, the younger child was sneered at by a funeral guest who told her she was selfish for crying.
In short, the real book is a much darker, more complex memoir than the condensed version. In fact, it's a completely different story, making Reader's Digest either the great bowdlerizer or the great children's book fantasist of the century. (But some of you knew that, didn't you?)
{GM - Bone Lace}
8:54:15 AM 
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