MADreads

Secret lives of TB patients–revealed!

April 23rd, 2009 Liz - Central Library

The World Below is a story that moves back and forth between a granddaughter (in her 50s) going through her now deceased grandmother Georgia’s belongings– including diaries– and the actual life her grandmother really lived, way back when.

Granddaughter Catherine had of course always known her Grandfather was much older than Grandmother.  She didn’t know that he was also her doctor, and the one who sent her to a sanitarium recuperate from TB.  As Catherine reads the short, veiled diary entries, we readers get to turn the page and read a first person account of what ‘really’ happened.

Life in the sanitarium was much different, and shall we say more ‘liberal’ in its codes of conduct, that the outside world at that time.  By moving her there, her doctor thought he’d get her away from the overwork of running the household following the death of her mother.  What he didn’t know was that romance bloomed there, regularly, and those who might be dying approached their current insular life sometimes with abandon (over-abandon?)

What worked here for me was the idea, well realized by author Sue Miller, that what you know from living in a particular family your whole life is different from what may be in a diary, which is surely an abridged version of what really happened.  And we adults all know our parents and grandparents were once young and foolish… but it can still be a shock.

As usual, Miller handles the interweaving of the storylines well.  Very engaging!

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction