Glad Farm Second Edition Front Cover
(Note: Glad Farm’s second edition is now available. The review that follows was done upon the first edition’s release in the summer of 2016.)
It’s tempting, and too easy, to describe Catherine Marenghi’s memoir, Glad Farm, as a great American success story. It is that, to be sure. She lived her first 17 years with her parents and four siblings in a ramshackle home in Milford, Massachusetts. The grinding poverty of her childhood reminds one of Jeannette Walls’s early years in her 2005 memoir Glass Castle.
Like Ms Walls, Ms Marenghi set herself free through her education. She earned a full scholarship to Tufts and went on to a prosperous career in writing and public relations. That’s the bare outline; that’s the American success story. That’s not enough, however. It doesn’t do justice to this elegantly written but searingly honest tale.
The Glad Farm that gave the book its title was the plot of land where she was raised. Her parents had grown and sold gladiolus flowers. The business did well for a time but failed before Catherine, the fourth of their five children, was born.
The family remained on the land and barely eked out an existence. The author is unsparingly frank in describing it all, including her inability to have school friends come to visit, her dealings with thoughtless peers and adults, and her often-contentious relations with mother and sisters. We also read of her coming of age on the outskirts of hippiedom in college, of her happy junior year abroad in Italy, and of a unique job as one of America’s first telecommuters.
Biography and memoir are best writ small. How well we experience the fine details – the colors, the smells, the images – are usually the difference between an average read and a superior one. Glad Farm is the latter.
Catherine Marenghi has a delightful knack of painting pictures with her words, of crafting similes and metaphors and of employing all those rhetorical devices that we’ve heard about but never could do ourselves.
It’s impossible not to feel the chill in that unheated home in the woods of Milford, or the cold wind on the slushy, ash-strewn pathway to the outhouse. We can see the streets, the artworks, and the people of Florence and Perugia, Italy. We can also feel her joy in motherhood and the swirling emotions that accompanied her divorce proceedings.
Author Catherine Marenghi
It takes the author almost a full lifetime to discover all that she, and we readers, need to know about her parents and about her extended family’s past. Her discovery of family correspondence and clippings in an old cedar chest reveal the details of her parents’ dreams and ambitions. She also learns of a betrayal, by relatives, that kept her family out of a much better house that was rightfully theirs.
Finally, she and we learn of another family tragedy that had proved too much for her father to overcome. It wasn’t just the failure of the gladiolus farm that crushed his spirit.
As she puts it, after first seeing a picture of her father in his younger days, “He was a good-looking man – not at all like the world-weary, gray haired father I remembered. I could see what my mother saw in him.”
To endure and prevail through the hardships and injustice that Catherine Marenghi experienced is remarkable enough. To endure and prevail without allowing bitterness to take hold would be much, much harder for most human beings.
I don’t think I’m revealing too much to report that that’s not what happens here. Catherine’s final words are a precise and eloquent summation, the essential message that readers should remember.
“Life, precious life, always wins over death. Life gets the last word.”
Yes, it does. And this wonderful book shows why.
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