I enjoyed this volume of Cleary's memoirs more than the first, which I read years ago. For one thing, her relationship with her mother was extremely difficult, and it was hard to read about a child like Beezus meeting such rejection and judgment from her own family. Cleary's character Ramona always had a special relationship with her father, as Beezus did with Aunt Beatrice, but Beezus and Ramona's mother was far more warm and loving than Cleary's own mother, in her telling. In this book, Cleary is off to college and away from home, delivered from the daily indignities of dealing with her mother, whose main unpleasant intrusion in this installment is to object strenuously to Cleary's eventual husband, due to his Catholicism.
The book was also enjoyable as many of the incidents that would turn up in Cleary's YA novels found their inspiration in this period of her life, in particular, the events of The Luckiest Girl, in which a teenager from Oregon spends a school year living with her mother's college roommate in Orange County. The orange juice stands, the transom window ... I recognized them all in Cleary's experience as a college student living with her mother's cousin in Southern California.
It's also a fascinating look into college life in the 1930s. Cleary's experiences were vastly different than my own, sixty years later. The book follows her through college, library school, a first position as a children's librarian, World War II, marriage, and, finally, the publication of her first book, Henry Huggins. None of her educational or professional experiences could be taken for granted, as a woman looking to take what might be seen as a man's job during the Depression, and over it all looms the unbearable thought of her having to return to her parents' home and live under their protection with her mother's disapproval.
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