From Our House: A Memoir

Synopsis

My father, when he was a boy, took it upon himself to change his name. My grandparents had named him Leroy Martin, but when he went to school and started learning cursive handwriting, he had trouble forming a capital ”L.” His answer to the problem was to drop the first two letters of his name and become, from then on, ”Roy.” If he couldn’t be “the King,” he would settle for merely “King.” So began his method for confronting obstacles with swift and decisive action. So begins the luminous and uniquely American memoir of Lee Martin, born into a farming family the same year his father unexpectedly lost both of his hands. Lee’s father, once known for ”doing a good turn for his neighbors,” changed that afternoon in the cornfields to become an embittered, hardened man. ”All our lives have private truths,” Martin writes, ”and the truth about my father was that after his accident he brought a deep and abiding rage into our home. I knew his hooks as intimately as I ever knew anything about my father.” Lee’s mother, called Beulah for the idyllic land at the end of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, never gave up hope that salvation might one day find their home. ”How easily our bodies become us, our souls bound to the material, to the joy or grief or pain we feel through our skin,” Martin muses. Ultimately it is his mother’s quiet compassion that accounts for the grace that Lee and his father finally discover both within themselves and within their small family. Learning to live by the seasons and to fall asleep to the rumble of his father’s tractor, braving snowstorms to sell hogs or to visit an ailing grandmother, playing basketball, listening to baseball games, and stealing records, Lee endures the anger and shame that haunt his family— yet grows up to tell his tale with rare beauty and remarkable forbearance. From Our House, buoyed on every page by Martin’s deep humanity, is a wonderful book that bears all the marks of a classic. As Paul Eggers, author of Saviors, wrote: ”Every page resonates with a kind of beautiful ache, of memory rescued from anger by Martin’s compassion and yes, even wisdom. It is a heartbreakingly redemptive book, one quietly aflame with sorrow and forgiveness. Martin captures the very essence of the family romance and shows us how love—the real stuff, love that is intelligent and muscular and wide-awake— can transform even the most bitter of experiences into something approaching grace. I haven’t been this moved by a book in years.”

Copyright:

2000

Book Details

Book Quality:

Excellent

Book Size:

193 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780525945468

Publisher:

Penguin Publishing Group

Date of Addition:

07/11/21

Copyrighted By:

Lee Martin

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Larry Lumpkin

Proofread By:

Susan Lumpkin

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.