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This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone, by Melissa Coleman
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“Lyrical and down-to-earth, wry and heartbreaking, This Life Is in Your Hands is a fascinating and powerful memoir. Melissa Coleman doesn’t just tell the story of her family’s brave experiment and private tragedy; she brings to life an important and underappreciated chapter of our recent history.” —Tom Perrotta
In a work of power and beauty reminiscent of Tobias Wolff, Jeannette Walls, and Dave Eggers, Melissa Coleman delivers a luminous, evocative childhood memoir exploring the hope and struggle behind her family's search for a sustainable lifestyle. With echoes of The Liars’ Club and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Coleman’s searing chronicle tells the true story of her upbringing on communes and sustainable farms along the rugged Maine coastline in the 1970’s, embedded within a moving, personal quest for truth that her experiences produced.
- Sales Rank: #393021 in eBooks
- Published on: 2011-04-12
- Released on: 2011-04-12
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
With urban farming and backyard chicken flocks becoming increasingly popular, Coleman has written this timely and honest portrait of her own childhood experience in Maine with her two homesteading parents during the turbulent 1970s. Inspired by the back-to-the-land lifestyle of Scott and Helen Nearing, Coleman's parents, Sue and Eliot, decided to create their own idyllic reality on 60 acres of land in Maine that was sold to them by the Nearing family for a token sum. While Coleman emphasizes the beauty of growing up in a family culture that valued the bounty of nature and freedom of expression, she does not hesitate to also expose farming's detrimental effect on family life—her own well-being as well as the accidental death of her younger sister. (Mar.)
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Review
“With beautiful lyrical prose, Coleman shows us what life in a 1970s back-to-nature farm was like, and the dear price her family paid pursuing their dream.”
From the Back Cover
A true story, both tragic and redemptive, This Life Is in Your Hands tells of the quest to make a good life, the role of fate, and the power of forgiveness.
In the fall of 1968, Melissa Coleman's parents pack their VW truck and set out to forge a new existence on a rugged coastal homestead. Inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the homesteading bible Living the Good Life, Eliot and Sue build their own home by hand, live off the crops they grow, and establish a happy family with Melissa and her two sisters. They also attract national media and become icons of the back-to-the-land farming movement, but the pursuit of a purer, simpler life comes at a price. In the wake of a tragic accident, idealism gives way to human frailty, and by the fall of 1978, Greenwood Farm is abandoned. The search to understand what happened is at the heart of this luminous, heartbreaking, and ultimately redemptive memoir.
Most helpful customer reviews
66 of 66 people found the following review helpful.
I was swept away
By Kathi D
I was drawn into this book right away, and could hardly put it down once I started reading. The story takes place in a time that seems at once very recent and very far away indeed. The author was born in the late 60's into a family committed to a life that most would consider intense deprivation, although many aspired to it--the life of the homesteader, who would be beholden to none but him/herself. Her parents had heard the siren song of Helen and Scott Nearing and joined them in Maine, purchasing a plot of land upon which they planned to raise their family by the work of their own hands.
And what a lot of work it was! I was a teenager when the Colemans were setting out to be organic farmers, and I read books by J. I. Rodale and the Nearings, fantasizing about the rural life. In my dreams it was so much more carefree! In fact, it was backbreaking and unceasing labor for the parents, and loneliness for the children, especially the eldest, Melissa, who longed for a friend. Soon enough, there was a baby sister to share the adventures of roaming about the farm in (literally) naked innocence, with the freedom to graze on the ripe fruits and explore the woods. Too much freedom, in fact, which eventually led to tragedy and heartbreak.
The family's story is interwoven with the events going on in the world outside, although for Papa, nothing much mattered on the radio broadcasts except the weather report, as he threw himself into making organic crops, enough to feed his family and grow the farm. Mama had to see to storing food for the long winter months while caring for first one and then two daughters, tending the goats and chickens, and helping with all the other farm chores. As it turned out, the "simple" life was not as simple as it seemed.
It's a heartbreaking and brave memoir. Melissa Coleman tells her story with sympathy for all involved, but doesn't shirk the hard details of just what "living the good life" cost her family.
85 of 91 people found the following review helpful.
Paradise Lost: Searching for Paradise and Ending up in Purgatory
By Les
As someone who grew up in a commune during the 1970s, the same time period described in this book, many of the themes in "This Life is In Your Hands" resonated for me. The sense of disillusionment that many young, college-educated liberals had with the war in Vietnam, political corruption, and the energy crisis (to name just a few of the societal ills of the time) led many to seek an alternative lifestyle. The back-to-the-land movement was a search for a simpler, purer life, or even a search for some version of paradise. Although, as someone in the book is quoted as saying, "the very nature of paradise is that it will be lost."
And my experience was exactly that. No such paradise existed, and many of those who were swept away by this back-to-the-land movement were lost souls. And people who are lost don't make very good, or very responsible, parents. The neglect that Melissa Coleman or "Lissie" and her siblings suffered was somewhat commonplace within hippie families. Basic tenets of childcare were rejected in the name of being healthy and free. In the case of the Coleman family, prenatal care was abandoned, childhood vaccinations (like tetanus shots) were overlooked, and a pond near the farmhouse lacked a fence. I was actually surprised that her parents sent young Lissie to school, but the sense one gets is that this was more about giving her mother a break from childcare, rather than about ensuring that Lissie received a good education.
My immediate emotional reaction to the book was recognition, and hard on the heels of this was sadness. Sadness that the idealism of Lissie's parents, and others like them, caused them to reject the negative parts of their society but fail to retain the positive parts. Sadness that this failure wreaked havoc on the lives of many of the children of my generation. We were often profoundly neglected or even abused so that our parents could "find themselves" in nature.
In terms of the book itself. I found the style of prose lyrical in many places, but also somewhat "spacey" or impressionistic. The descriptions of nature were well done and the reader has a sense of being there. However, the descriptions of events was somewhat odd. Often an event was partially described and then abandoned abruptly. At other times the perspective jumped around from present to past to future which was somewhat disorienting and frankly annoying. Another oddity was that the central tragedy (that comes at the very end of the book) is revealed on the dust jacket. I would have preferred not to have had the climax revealed, so this very much ruined the book for me. Given that I did know about the tragedy that occurred within the family, I was sensitized to the sense of foreboding and pending doom that hovers over the story. Eventually, I became frustrated by this and wanted to simply get to the tragedy itself to end the relentless build-up.
Finally, I think it is a tricky thing to write a memoir while one's relatives are still alive. I had the sense that this would have been a very different book had the author's parents not been living. In fact, I think it would have been a better book because there would have been less of a sense of constraint and self-conscious diplomacy.
56 of 60 people found the following review helpful.
Haunting
By Rushmore
This should be required reading for anyone who only sees the romance of living off the land. As seen through Melissa (Liss) Coleman's eyes, it was hard work, and the experiment ultimately destroyed her family.
Eliot and Sue Coleman were idealistic young people when they purchased 60 acres adjacent to the farm of Helen and Scott Nearing. In fact, the lifestyle values ideals over people. Their three daughters were raised by a passing parade of apprentices while the parents worked very, very hard to realize their dream of living off the land.
Actually I feel that Eliot and Sue were guilty of an insidious form of child abuse. Their daughters did not choose to live that life. As the eldest, Liss was working the farm at a very young age. She was terribly lonely and hungry for friends her own age. The parents seemed to put minimal effort into raising their daughters. Eliot became a kind of prophet, obsessed with his mission of sustainable biological farming. He worked crazy hours. Liss posits that his diet led to a vitamin deficiency and a subsequent thyroid condition. In any event, he eventually rejected his family, not just once but several times. Sue was mentally fragile and incapable of disciplining her daughters. When they got rambunctious, Sue in her own words "checked out." She fasted periodically which weakened her further and kept her less available to her children. The highest price was paid by Heidi, the middle daughter. After a terrible tragedy, any hope the family had of restoring their delicate balance was gone for good.
Melissa Coleman tells her story as more of a reporter than a memoirist. Her voice is somewhat detached but she provides excruciating detail, so the curious reader has a very strong sense of how it felt to live that life. The whole story is told through something of a haze. Although there is evidence of the drugs and free love that permeated the 1970s, it just feels like something that happened in a totally different part of the world.
Ironically, although the Colemans and the apprentices make sarcastic references to Helen and Scott Nearing cheating on the dream, in the end it seems that they were a lot more realistic than the others. When the Maine winter came, they travelled to a warmer climate. They enjoyed some processed foods such as ice cream. They were childless, and Helen in particular stated that the environment was not good for families. In fact Eliot and Sue simply worked too hard on the homestead to have the time or energy for the demanding work of raising their children.
Melissa Coleman is a survivor. However, the life is ultimately more punishing than redeeming. This is a very serious book and a sad one.
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