What you will see unfurling below you, in a spectacular display of autism and geeky pride, is the result of MONTHS of research a couple years ago …<\/p>\n
I’ll give you the background.<\/p>\n
One of my geek credentials is Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the “Anne of Green Gables” series, and many many more, all wonderful books. I have them all. Have read them all multiple times. Over the past 10 years, volumes of her journals have been published <\/a>– which was like, for me, being a kid in a candy store.<\/p>\n There are 4 volumes altogether. They are addictive. There is so much to say about her, her life, her writing …<\/p>\n I came up with an idea for a project – which hasn’t come to fruition yet, so I will not divulge it here. Dont’ want anyone to steal my great idea.<\/p>\n But once the idea came, I went on a rampage of research. And when I say rampage, I mean rampage.<\/p>\n I kept notes, I kept a filing cabinet, I color-coded my notes, I filed them in different folders – it was completely autistic and obsessive. I get SO MUCH DONE when I am motivated. My research led me onto tangents, which led me onto further tangents – until the project was completely out of control. I gave myself the assignment to read all of her favorite books – which I did.<\/p>\n At least the ones I could get my hands on.<\/p>\n LM Montgomery was born in the 1880s, and died in the early 1940s. She published 42 best-selling books, and hundreds and hundreds of short stories. Her first novel was Anne of Green Gables<\/i> which was a runaway best-seller, and spawned many many many sequels. 8 in all. The need for “more” about Anne never ended. She describes getting a pleading letter from a Muslim girls in India, saying, “When will there be another book about Anne??” That’s just one example. She was bombarded with letters, throughout her career, asking for “more, more, more”.<\/p>\n I admire her so much. She did not have a particularly happy life. She married badly. She had a love in her girlhood which – ended tragically – and she never recovered. 60 years later, she describes driving her car by the town where this youthful romance had once happened, and feeling her heart pulling up out of her chest, aching for him.<\/p>\n It’s crazy.<\/p>\n BUT – and here’s why I admire her – she had an extremely unhappy marriage. And yet – because of her wild passion in her early 20s for this other man – she was a romantic, at heart – and ALL of that stuff, all of that repressed stuff went into her books. I think that’s why girls love her books so much. They are so romantic, without being mushy. No, LM Montgomery, strict upstanding Presbyterian, couldn’t be mushy. But she does believe in love, and she was quite militant about her belief in the happy ending. That there is no “shame” in a happy ending.<\/p>\n Until I read her journals, I had no idea what a courageous outlook that really was.<\/p>\n I thought she was just optimistic.<\/p>\n But when I read her diaries, I realized: Wow. Her life has given her nothing but grief. It gets worse and worse and worse. And what kept her alive, what kept her heart going, was her writing.<\/p>\n And NOBODY writes a happy ending like Lucy Maud Montgomery.<\/p>\n She usually delays the happy ending until the very last page. You read the entire book, thinking, “Oh my God, I hope these two hook up … I hope they get together…” and not until the last paragraph, does she give you what you want.<\/p>\n Again, until I read her journals, I thought that it was just a literary style, something that stamped a book as “hers”. When I read about her life, the thwarted love, the broken heart, the terrible marriage to a man who went mad almost directly following their marriage – she had had no idea he had a history of mental illness (who the hell talked about such things in 1901??) – and so there she was, saddled with a mental invalid for the next 35 years …<\/p>\n So of COURSE her books would be filled with pain, and loss … unresolved until the very last page.<\/p>\n She HAD to have happy endings. It was the only thing that would get her through each moment, the belief that sometimes, somewhere, things work out, and people are happy.<\/p>\n Back to my project:<\/p>\n I kept EXTENSIVE files on her. She was a voracious reader, and she kept notes of what she read in her journals.<\/p>\n I’m posting a TON of them below, for any of you literature-freaks, or critics out there. I’ve read a lot of them now – because of this project. I read “Decline and Fall of the Goddamn Roman Empire” because Lucy Maud loved it so much. I read the poetry of Tennyson for the first time. I read Washington Irving (one of her favorites). I read freakin’ “Pilgrims Progress”, for God’s sake.<\/p>\n I’m insane, I know, and I know I’m geeky – but I’m sure there are some literature and language-hounds out there who will like to read these words.<\/p>\n The woman certainly knows how to turn a phrase.<\/p>\n I put an Amazon link to every book in question at the bottom of each post (when I could locate the books … Many of them are so obscure and out-of-print you could never find them.)<\/p>\n And so now: here is the Geek-Parade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What you will see unfurling below you, in a spectacular display of autism and geeky pride, is the result of MONTHS of research a couple years ago … I’ll give you the background. One of my geek credentials is Lucy … Continue reading