“In this new edition of her memoir, Linda Joy Myers illustrates just how powerful the combination of memory confronted, forgiveness offered, and new love expressed, can be. What I admire most about this book is the way the author takes you to her most sustaining love — the prairie land of the Midwest — and concludes her story as a return to that place where forgiveness becomes “a feather on my heart, as natural as the plains wind.”
-Shirley Showalter, former president of Goshen College, author of the blog I Have a Story.
“I wanted to tell the secret stories that my great-grandmother Blanche whispered to me on summer nights in a featherbed in Iowa. I was eight and she was eighty . . .”
At the age of four, a little girl stands on a cold, windy railroad platform in Wichita, Kansas, watching a train take her mother away. For the rest of her life, her mother will be an only occasional—and always troubled—visitor who denies her the love she longs for.
Linda Joy Myers’s compassionate, gripping, and soul-searching memoir tells the story of three generations of daughters who, though determined to be different from their absent mothers, ultimately follow in their footsteps, recreating a pattern that they yearn to break. Accompany Linda as she uncovers family secrets, seeks solace in music, and begins her healing journey—ultimately transcending the prison of her childhood and finding forgiveness for her family and herself.
This edition includes a new afterword in which Myers confronts her family’s legacy and comes full circle with her daughter and grandchildren, seeding a new path for them.
Author: Linda Joy Myers
Publication Date: February 1, 2013