Post #97 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Married at Fourteen: A True Story
Reviewed by Lanie Tankard
Here is a memoir about life in the fast lane of the San Francisco Bay area during the Sixties and beyond, by a woman who managed to exit the freeway and reset her speedometer.
Lucille Lang Day never let any grass grow under her feet. She had a very full life, partly because she got a very early start on living it. In Married at Fourteen, she offers an account of running away from home at thirteen, being suspended from school and getting married at fourteen, giving birth at fifteen, filing for divorce at sixteen, remarrying the same man at seventeen, divorcing again at eighteen, marrying another man nine years later, having a second daughter, divorcing again, marrying again, trying to get pregnant but failing, and becoming a grandmother.
In between these events, she hates her mother, helps steal a car and license plates, is put in juvenile detention, gets a parole officer, owns a switchblade, goes to a Hell’s Angels party, rides motorcycles, works at Chicken Delight and a gas station, deals with anorexia, handles bankruptcy, smokes pot, takes psychedelic drugs, shoplifts, and forges.
How in the world, then, did she ever manage to get her high school GED from a technical school, and then enroll at UC Berkeley and walk away with a PhD—after which she earned two master’s degrees at San Francisco State? That question is the crux of the memoir.
Interestingly, Day’s first daughter begins to exhibit some of the same characteristics when she hits her teenage years. The author goes back to plumb her mother’s early life searching for commonalities in the three generations.
Because Day was a student at Berkeley during People’s Park and the Vietnam War protests, I wish she had devoted more to these events. Instead she writes of a campus protest, “I walked away, back to the small trials of my own life.” Even if she were not actively involved, the place and the times can’t help but be part of the context of the story. This is an important point for all memoir writers.
Lucille Lang Day used her training in science and math education to try to engage young children in the world of ideas during her career. She combined her love of science and math with her love of writing. In her memoir, she lays out her early defiance of authority in the same manner—to help people comprehend the forces at work behind that behavior. Being so open in a memoir takes a lot of courage.
When taken as a whole, the memoir is like a fairy tale that did come true, with the subtitle proclaiming it as “a true story.” The arc of Day’s life should give hope to any parent watching teenage rebellion in action.
Lanie Tankard is a freelance writer and editor in Austin, Texas. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews, she has also been an editorial writer for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville.
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