Ever since she was a child, Linda Joy Myers felt the power of the past. As the third daughter in her family to be abandoned or estranged by a mother, she observed the consequences of that heritage on the women she loved as well as herself. But thanks to the stories told to her by her great-grandmother, Myers received a gift that proved crucial in her life: the idea that everyone is a walking … storybook, and that we all have within us the key to a deeper understanding of life—the secret stories that make themselves known even without words.
Song of the Plains is a weaving of family history that starts in the Oklahoma plains and spans over forty years as Myers combs through dusty archives, family stories, and genealogy online. She discovers the secrets that help to explain the fractures in her family, and the ways in which her mother and grandmother found a way not only to survive the great challenges of their eras, but to thrive despite mental illness and abuse. She discovers how decisions made long ago broke her family apart—and she makes it her life’s work to change her family story from one of abuse and loss to one of finding and creating a new story of hope, forgiveness, healing, and love.
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Linda Joy Myers, psychotherapist, writing coach, and memoirist has proven herself an historian as well in her most recent work Song of the Plains (2017). In this memoir the author provides a window into the workings of one dysfunctional family lineage and opens a door to understanding how to write a better story in her own generation.
Once a shy, young girl moved about at the whim of adults, Myers is in full command of her story, which spans more than three generations beginning in the Midwest, her beloved Iowa plains. The plains with its azure skies and undulating wheat fields infuses the narrator’s mindscape and comes alive on the page: “The land recorded it; the history of everything that occurred was embedded in every rock and every grain of red dirt. History marked us with invisible particles upon our skin. Later, I would learn that this is true: we inhale the dirt and dust, it becomes part of our bodies— earth to earth, dust to dust— and that history lives in our very cells.”
Myers views her family with a wide-angle lens, encompassing more than three generations, fraught with secrets and silence as her subtitle suggests. She focuses particularly on the women (great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother), whose irrationality and unpredictability sent her young life into a tailspin. The Gram who once or twice called Sugar Pie, repeatedly denounced her with rants and rages. Ironically, in an odd progression of nurturing, Linda’s feminine forebears became a kind of “mother” as grandmothers, forsaken by their own mothers.
For readers with a sketchy grasp of family history, the author provides her own methodical roadmap to discovery: checking local newspaper archives, courthouse and library records, and of course digital resources like Ancestry.com.
For those wishing for insight into patterns of family history, the author discovers: “genetic patterns are carried from generation to generation in ways that are unconscious, yet they whisper to us the hints that can save us.” And later, she proves that it is possible to move beyond the trauma of the past: “When we look back on the past, the person we were then hovers like a ghost, familiar but blurry. In a fresh perspective offered by the passage of time, when I remember myself then, I reflect on what “she” did, that younger person who is no longer me.”
Beyond psychoanalysis, the memoir is a pleasure to read because of the lyrical prose, for example: “Miss Daisy was from Virginia and gave off the air of a classic Southern woman, with her rose-scented bath powder and good manners. Her wrinkled fingers could speed across the baby-grand piano in the living room, inspiring Gram to tell me to practice more so I could play like Miss Daisy. We spent every weekend at their house, Gram and I sleeping together in the double bed, the sheets a soft cotton that smelled of the sun, the bedspread fluffy white chenille. I loved running my fingers across the little bumps. Her room smelled of perfume and powder and sun and fresh air.”
A few years ago, I met Linda Joy Myers as a memoir writing coach and the author of several how-to write memoir books. Thus, I can echo the truth of these words near the end of her second memoir: Writing is “a magic way to enter another time and place, a way to travel through time and learn something new about ourselves and our lives. Writing gives us a voice and helps us break the silence.” Song of the Plains is a living testament to the value of that statement.