My Own Two Feet: A Memoir

Reviewed May 2004

The second book in the life of Beverly Clearly is as good as the first. Her struggles to support herself through college were realistic. I felt for her in feeling overwhelmed. I envy her knowledge of knowing that she wanted to be a children’s librarian with the idea she would

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write children’s books. Her mother and father surly sacrificed to send her to college. I hope Beverly paid them back in full and arranged for some nice vacations they sure earned it. The story of her mother living through the happiness of her daughter is very sad. If it hadn’t been for the Depression her mom could have gone far. I wish Clearly had continued past her first book a bit farther to show what happened later. She included a lot more of her life than I thought she would and I started getting lost with all the people in her life. Writing her first book seemed easy the way she explained how it was done. She said she struggled, but the first publisher she wrote to took it on the first try. Agatha Christie was rejected 54 times with her first book.

6-2004

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A great continuation of Beverly Cleary's autobiography. I did again think about how much her mother's actions and behaviors must have marked Mrs. Cleary's life. I appreciated the way the two books built up to the writing of Henry Huggins, and all the ways Mrs. Cleary's life brought her to the point

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that she was finally able to sit down and write.

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This memoir is engagingly written, covering the period from Cleary's high-school graduation to the submission of her first manuscript, Henry and Ribsy. I loved Beverly Cleary's books when I was growing up, and her memoir offers some keen observations about the way that growing up on the American

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West Coast during the 20s and 30s informed her fictional characters.

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I loved this memoir!! So much rich detail, such fast-moving, lively prose! Cleary's wonderful sense of humor comes through. Cleary recounts her college years during the Depression, first at Chaffey College in southern California, then at the University of California (in Berkeley), and finally at

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the University of Washington. She then describes working as a librarian in Yakima, and at military installations in Oakland during World War 2. Finally she writes about how she wrote her first book. She describes her social life, family life, academics, and work in detail--what she studied in classes, how she went about writing her first book--but it never bogs down.

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Perhaps, having fallen in love with Cleary's books as a child, my expectations were too high. I went into this expecting self-deprecating, witty vignettes, skillfully told, underpinned by a foundation of compassion and empathy for all the innocent things of the earth - children, animals, family

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values. Instead, what I got was a serviceably written but largely humorless memoir about a mostly unremarkable life.

Shall I blame my grandmother as well? A college graduate herself, she filled me with so many stories of her own life growing up in the Depression era, there wasn't a lot here that I hadn't heard before. Like my grandmom, Cleary grew up in a family that always had enough money for food, but not for much else. Like my grandmom, she longed to escape an uncomfortable relationship with her mother and managed to scrap enough money to attend college. Like my grandmom, she accumulated, in addition to a degree, a wealth of anecdotes about eccentric professors and even more eccentric roommates, beaus and balls and rooming houses and cooking meals on tiny hot plates. Like my grandmom, she fell in love and spent the next few decades following her husband from town to town. Like my grandmom, it took years for her to finally find enough confidence to begin living her own creative life.

Alas, however, we don't learn a lot about this creative life. To hear Cleary tell it, she spent her whole life knowing she wanted to write children's books, yet when the time came, she had no ideas waiting to be brought to life. Instead, she relied on bits and pieces of memory to pull together enough material for a single story, which became Henry Huggins. She didn't even have to struggle to get the work published: it was accepted by the first publishing house she sent it to. The only extraordinary thing she brought to the table was a general idea, patched together from a passing reference made by an English professor and her experiences as a librarian relating stories to children, that children's books ought to tell stories about real children living real lives and entangling themselves in real misadventures.

And that's where the book ends. No additional insights into her creative process. No additional insights into how writing altered her life, her marriage, her relationship with her mother, or her aspirations. If this is all being saved for a 3rd book, then Ms. Cleary had better start writing faster, because according to Wikipedia she's 103 years old.

I don't wish to discourage people from reading this book. It's authentic, inoffensive, and competently written. Just don't expect this to entertain in the way that Cleary's utterly charming childrens' book never fail to do.

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Re-reading in honor of Beverly Cleary. All these years later, I appreciate her life story and personal challenges even more.