The Belinda Chronicles

Linda Seidels lightly fictionalized memoir lets readers feel what its like for a naturally skeptical yetpersistently naïve older woman to watch her parents age out of life to think about the epiphanies they enable her to have and to reflect on the lives of elders she didnt appreciate until shed worn through some years herself. The elders whose stories Seidel reconstructs were quintessentially American--meaning complex subtle and challenging--whether its a shell shocked grandfather who immigrated to Pennsylvania almost a century ago after fighting for Germany in a World War or a mother who was secretly spitting out her pills at the Lucky Stroke Nursing Home in Missouri in 2018.The Chronicles are organized organically starting with a Prologue about Belindas search for a genre. The genre which she discovers is a series of vignettes gently shaped and pruned so that readers can study them individually as smaller sets and cumulatively. Thus for example the initial series of nine short pieces is gathered under the title Women and Mothers. It includes stories about her mothers childhood (Trudis Parents) her grandmothers old age (Lotte) and several about her mother Trudis last months branching into dead-on accurate sketches of contemporary nursing home life and workers (Marty the Nurse). The final vignette of Women and Mothers (titled Wasting Time: Love and Class) involves reflections on a pair of potential marriages which didnt happen-reflections which lead naturally to a new two-part section titled Belinda Reflects.The seven vignettes gathered next Men and Fathers offer detailed glimpses into the lives of a prosperous sometimes pompous great-grandfather his son the charming womanizing (?) Lyle and especially his grandson Leonard the professional musician and music teacher whose slow decline into dementia eventually brought him to the Lucky Stroke near Belinda and his ex-wife Trudi. In these pieces as Belinda later reflects shes portraying them not at their best but at ... their most human.Our memoirists piquant reflections nourish all her stories as surely as sap does a tree. In the four sets of stories called Belinda Reflects which alternate with sets labeled Orphans or Weddings and Funerals the musings are more like rainfall or manna. The Belinda Chronicles are rooted in Seidels family history factual enough to be a memoir though the names have been changed. Theyre enriched by the authors 21st century awareness of patriarchy feminism class biases and anti-immigrant prejudice. One further tribute to Belindas roots comes in the center of the book where just after a chapter titled Peonies Seidel has slipped in seven family photos the oldest taken about 1910 the newest including herself as a toddler. The family tree uses Chronicles pseudonyms but the dates are accurate.In summary we quote from the Acknowledgements section which ends the book: [I] regard my familys collective memories and stories as legacies a kind of inheritance exploited and treasured by the Belinda character in these vignettes.... My greatest debt is to my elders whose stories I have appropriated and who might feel alternately outraged and honored on every page were they alive to read me.