Audio memoirs

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, May 2019; written by Tammy Dinsmore

This spring I have listened to some really good memoirs on audio.

The first was Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm, by Mardi Jo Link and read by Karen White. After nineteen years of marriage, Mardi Jo files for divorce. They were always struggling with their finances, but now that she’s on her own financially it’s even worse. She is trying to raise 3 boys and keep the small farm she has in Northern Michigan. She is a freelance writer, so income doesn’t come on a regular basis. She and the boys work hard every day to make the farm feed themselves, one year winning a local zucchini growing contest and winning a years’ worth of locally made bread. At the same time she is trying to keep the banker from foreclosing on her home. She learns about butchering hogs, raising chickens, fixing equipment, and as the title says, picking herself up by the bootstraps and soldiering on. The story isn’t all gloom and doom. There are some funny anecdotes in here as well.

Next up was Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover and read by Julia Whelan. Tara was brought up in a survivalist household in Northern Idaho. She and her siblings were “homeschooled”, but only the older kids actually got any education at all. Her education while growing up was working for her father in a scrap yard, although an older brother helped her learn how to read. She was both physically and mentally abused by another brother, and was ignored by her parents when she tried to tell them about the abuse. As a teenager, she got a job and started earning her own money, and when she was old enough, one of her older brothers who had already gone off to school talked her into applying for college at Brigham Young University. In order for her to get in, she would need to study hard and educate herself just to pass the SATs. Tara gets accepted to college and then she tries to balance getting an education and being with her family. This was a heartbreaking story, but also very uplifting.

Last but not least is Becoming by Michelle Obama. Michelle narrates her own story here. It starts when she is a young Michelle Robinson, living in a small upstairs apartment with her parents and older brother on the South Side of Chicago. Education is everything to her parents and they do all that they can to make sure their children understand the importance of that education. Michelle talks about the schools she attended, the friends she made and what it took to get into an Ivy League University. She also talks about going to law school and getting a job at a prestigious firm only to discover that she wasn’t too keen on practicing that profession for the rest of her life. While she is at the law firm, she meets her future husband, Barak. Her story goes on to tell how each career move impacted her, how Barak’s political ambitions were not something she herself aspired to, and how hard it was for them to conceive their children. There is so much more to this book than what I’ve summarized here, but I really enjoyed listening to it.

If you don’t care to have someone read you these stories, we have them in print as well.