Creative Non-Ficion / Memoir / Travel
Date Published: Paperback out this March / eBook November 2014
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Nancy McCabe, who grew up in Kansas just a few hours from the Ingalls family’s home in Little House on the Prairie, always felt a deep connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. McCabe read Little House on the Prairie during her childhood and visited Wilder sites around the Midwest with her aunt when she was thirteen. But then she didn’t read the series again until she decided to revisit in adulthood the books that had so influenced her childhood. It was this decision that ultimately sparked her desire to visit the places that inspired many of her childhood favorites, taking her on a journey that included stops in the Missouri of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Minnesota of Maud Hart Lovelace, the Massachusetts of Louisa May Alcott, and even the Canada of Lucy Maud Montgomery.
From Little Houses to Little Women reveals McCabe’s powerful connection to the characters and authors who inspired many generations of readers. Traveling with McCabe as she rediscovers the books that shaped her and ultimately helped her to forge her own path, readers will enjoy revisiting their own childhood favorites as well.
From the Prologue:
When my daughter was still a toddler and I was overwhelmed by the chores and errands and tasks of a single parent with a full-time job, I found myself reminiscing fondly about the books I’d read when I was young. Having a child made me miss my own childhood—not the miseries of forgotten homework or lost retainers or shifting friendships, but the joys of the uninterrupted hours that I spent reading.
Back then I’d floated across seamless surfaces of prose, absorbed in books without an eye on the clock or an ever-present guilt about neglected duties. Now, my job required heavy reading, but that was work, more like swimming: I had to be aware of each stroke, of the tricky rhythms of breath. I was tired of being tightly scheduled and hyper-organized. I was tired of being too busy to while away at least an occasional afternoon with a book. I just wanted to plop down and read for hours and hours.
When my daughter was still a toddler and I was overwhelmed by the chores and errands and tasks of a single parent with a full-time job, I found myself reminiscing fondly about the books I’d read when I was young. Having a child made me miss my own childhood—not the miseries of forgotten homework or lost retainers or shifting friendships, but the joys of the uninterrupted hours that I spent reading.
Back then I’d floated across seamless surfaces of prose, absorbed in books without an eye on the clock or an ever-present guilt about neglected duties. Now, my job required heavy reading, but that was work, more like swimming: I had to be aware of each stroke, of the tricky rhythms of breath. I was tired of being tightly scheduled and hyper-organized. I was tired of being too busy to while away at least an occasional afternoon with a book. I just wanted to plop down and read for hours and hours.
About the Author
Nancy McCabe is the author of four memoirs about travel, books, parenting, and adoption as well as the novel Following Disasters. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, and many other magazines and anthologies, including In Fact Books’ Oh Baby! True Stories about Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love and McPherson and Company’s Every Father’s Daughter: Twenty-Four Women Writers Remember their Fathers. Her work has received a Pushcart and been recognized on Notable lists in Best American anthologies six times.
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