Dirt

August 1, 2020
Marantz's West Virginia heritage is peopled with coal miners and loggers: folks familiar with dirty hands, hard work, and dangerous jobs. After her mother took a job to provide for the family, which also provided a way out of a strained marriage, Marantz spent formative years with a tough but loving grandmother who took her to church. The single-wide trailer she called home barely kept out the elements, and at school she acutely felt the difference of her socioeconomic condition. The need to prove her worth drove her to keep achieving: to rise above being a trailer-girl. The striving takes her to a university, a year in England, and later, Yale Law School. Although she eschews a law practice, she and her new husband build a successful business, but something is still missing. All her striving had shut out a deeper understanding of grace, and Marantz realizes that striving never ends, but grace is limitless, and those are very different things. Movingly written, this is a joy for lovers of memoirs in the Glass Castle strain.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)