Live Said What's Wrong

Joann Murray’s essay on “Someone’s Mother,” describes a time when she was driving down the highway in Albany, coming from a dentist appointment when she spotted a hitchhiker. Now this is nothing unusual for hitchhikers to be on this highway but it was something about this one that captured Joan’s attention. She was half way down the road but her intuition made her make a U-turn and go back. Another reason she turned around is because the lady would not stop waving until she stopped. This hitchhiker was different from most hitchhikers, she had on a raincoat and a black hat and her hair was white. As Joan approached her, she could tell that she was an old lady. She was under the impression the old lady’s vehicle had broken down but there was no vehicle in sight. The lady informed Joan that she just needed a ride to “Nassau, which was three miles away. While riding down the road she found out the lady was ninety two years old and was apparently was “out for a walk.” The old lady begged Joan to drop her off at a drugstore in town instead of at her residence. This made Joan reminisce about the time when her ninety year old mother called her brother and said she did not remember how to get dressed anymore. Shortly after that, Joan had to put her mother in a nursing home. Joan began to realize the lady had been lost before, especially after seeing a white dove pinned to her collar. The older lady expressed dropping her off at

“She hasn’t felt too healthy since my brother Allie dies. She’s very nervous. That’s another reason why I hated like hell for her to know I got the ax

As the women walk through the house, they begin to get a feel for what Mrs. Wright’s life is like. They notice things like the limited kitchen space, the broken stove, and the broken jars of fruit and begin to realize the day-to-day struggles that Mrs. Wright endured. The entire house has a solemn, depressing atmosphere. Mrs. Hale regretfully comments that, for this reason and the fact that Mr. Wright is a difficult man to be around, she never came to visit her old friend, Mrs. Wright.

Kathleen Grissom’s The Kitchen House is an intense, gripping novel set at the turn of the nineteenth century, entertaining and educating about life in the Old South. The first person narration switches between Lavinia McCarten, a young, white indentured servant, and Belle, the caretaker of Lavinia who is also the mixed, illegitimate daughter of Master Pyke. Both of the speakers live in the kitchen house of a tobacco plantation called Tall Oaks, Virginia. When the story begins in 1791, Belle is a young woman, and she teaches six-year-old Lavinia how to cook, clean, and serve. As Lavinia matures, she realizes that her fair skin makes her different from the slaves, her true family, and she learns to accept her responsibilities. Through the eyes of the two, readers learn about what life was like during the times of American slavery. Important themes prevalent in The Kitchen House include racism, drug and alcohol abuse, and innocence.

The Glass Castle is an enthralling story of Jeannette Walls’s extraordinary childhood riddled with unfortunate circumstance after circumstance. With her parents unable to hold steady jobs, Jeanette and her siblings became accustomed to constantly running from bill collectors, living in a continuous cycle of hazardous, disheveled homes, never knowing when or where their next meal was going to come from. Her memoir begins with the rehashing of a trip she took as an adult to attend a party in New York City's Upper East Side. As Walls glances out the window of her taxi, she spots her mother, Rosemary, rummaging through the garbage. Jeanette panics and promptly turns back home, first worrying about her professional image hoping no one will see the two of them together. But then she worries on a much deeper level about her mother's wellness, being cold, homeless, and alone in the New York winter. Following this, Jeanette has a lunch meeting with her mother which prompts Jeannette to contemplate her parents' unfortunate voluntary lifestyle and the childhood she had with such unstable and erratic “role models.”

Much like her own persona, Pauline lives in storefront apartment that is physically unattractive and relatively dull on the inside. It is the lowest of the lows, which is similar to how Pauline views herself. Taking care of the Fishers home gave Pauline the opportunity to live out fantasies about beauty. Dreaming of Jean Harlow allowed her a false reality in which she could pretend she was an icon for beauty. In the same sense, she could live out this dream by tending to the needs of the Fishers and pretending that their home was her own. The cleanliness, respect, and grandeur that accompanied the home allowed Pauline to fantasize and live out an identity she had long dreamed of becoming. Geraldine’s obsession with cleanliness and presentation controlled all aspects of her life. These values condemned her to a life of emotionless racial self-denial and were on constant display through her house. Pauline and Geraldine were both victims of the social pressures of that time, each of them constantly struggling in their own way to become something they couldn’t. Whether they knew it or not, their surroundings visually represented the conflicts they were dealing with and demonstrated their internal battle with the standard of

Morning brought the peace of a warm sunny day to the small town of Tributary; such a contrast to the violent events of the day before, still there was a sense of mourning in the air. The town folk spent much of the day recovering lost property. Everyone felt fortunate to have found their missing belongings. Everyone except Corvida Bratleigh! Rather than being thankful her playhouse was undamaged by the tornado, Corvida was angry that her playhouse was in Nikki Fernandez’s garden! The playhouse was hers, not Nikki’s and she was going to make sure that Nikki did not step one foot in her lovely little house.

The protagonist of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is Eleanor Vance, an emotionally underdeveloped young woman with a dark past. As a character, she has a deep connection to the broad theme of family within the novel, and more specifically, how the lack of family when it is desperately needed leads to emptiness.

Throughout this memoir Walls discloses countless episodes of how she survived her childhood. Her parents did not have a stable income to support four children. Thus, this made Walls and her other siblings undergo unpleasant predicaments when it came to surviving their youth. Their living situation was not stable for any individual to live. To emphasize, there was no indoor plumbing, no hot water, and no electricity. It was hard for them to function at times. They had to live in these conditions because their parents did not have a steady income and this living situation was the only thing they could afford.

Linda stayed in her Aunt Martha’s attic for around seven years. She began to get feeble, due to being cramped in a small space for so long. In the cracks she could see her children.

contradiction to Norma Jean Baker’s life, Oates was protected from the outside world because of the care and support her parents showed for her. Baker's fame meant nothing to her parents because they never cared for her. Oates writes her stories about people who are not protected and must try to get through life just like Norma Jean Baker had to.

When Ann Fay’s father went off to war he bought Ann Fay a pair of blue overalls. He told her that she was now the “man” of the house because she was the oldest child and the only one able to do hard work. Her brother was 4 and she had twin sister who were 6 years old. Ann Fay had a friend named Junior who volunteered to help her family. Ann Fay’s daddy told Junior that he could drive the family’s truck. Ann Fay insisted that her sibling help in the garden and do chores.

Her husband kept her locked away and visitors were few and far between. Her company was limited to her Mother, Nellie and her children. But only for quick visits that never lasted long enough,“Only certain people could come see her at fourth of July”(....). She was trapped in a room and eventually in her head. Her visits with outsiders were so infrequent that they too seemed like part of her twisted imagination and ugly pattern of the wallpaper.

In The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson addresses the pervasiveness of maternal bonds in a horror-based context, and asserts that a mother-daughter bond gives people the nourishment and sense of individuality needed to live out a decent and sensible life. She engages her readers through the mind of a socially awkward women named Eleanor, who was ultimately victimized by her mother, and now seeks to gain a maternal acceptance, a fundamental need or vital blood connection. Eleanor seeks to fulfill herself by obtaining that motherly bond or that “cup of stars” which makes her human—an individual identity with a sense of belonging in the world. Hill House then targets Eleanor’s vulnerability, her desperate need for maternal acceptance, and presents itself as a tempting illusion—a mother, someone who loves her, a place where she can belong—to her. Roberta Rubenstein strongly explicates the idea of Hill House representing a parental figure, which according to her, poses as both “an enticing yet devouring mother” with a preoedipal love interest (Rubenstein). Yet, there is a situational irony taking place; Jackson presents the text to us in a way in which we can see Hill House’s evil attributes, while in turn, Eleanor decides to foolishly ignore them, and the house begins to consume her as a result. And just as Eleanor is both enticed and repulsed by the house, so are we. We recognize its evil appearance, and know it represents a form of danger, and yet we slowly grow

Maddie, a girl who stood by while Wanda was ridiculed about her dresses, felt very sick inside. She was a part of making someone so unhappy she had moved away to the city. Repentant Maddie and her friend