Second Star to the Right

The author is a grandmother, explorer, survivor, activist, and writer strutting into her eighth decade. Second Star to the Right is a chronicle of those years, her anguish and her bliss splashed across the page.

Seeking truth while risking leaps of faith, the role of protector becomes her calling. When her brother suffers a catastrophic injury, she promises to hold her family erect. Finally, she swears to stand beside her loved ones as they battle their own deluge of deadly diseases.

Tumbling down forbidden love opens her heart to life's greatest possibilities. Sailing out into a planet pre-globalization, she resolves to live the life of a bold wanderer. When her ship sinks in a distant ocean, and a raft meant to offer her life transforms into her deathbed, she gratefully accepts a proposal of marriage in the final moments when all seems lost.

Traveling alone to work in Africa acutely alters the reality in which she will forever after be able to engage her world.
Yet, it is while raising her own children in an arena that, as the fierce Ms. Didion observes, "the ground trembled and the center threatened not to hold," where she meets her greatest challenge. Like all remarkable women rising every day to till the sacred earth of their remarkable lives, she illuminates what we mysterious creatures are capable of when we summon ourselves.

This is the true story of one girl's passage. It begins in the farm belt with her seemingly inauspicious entrance into a post-World War Two Norman Rockwell America and goes on to chart the circuitous course which that girl will fight to stay, for her subsequent seventy-plus tumultuous years. The realism of extraordinary elements unique to this author's tale, revealed with brutal honesty in graphic detail and delivered straight from the heart, will take the reader's breath away. Real life is breathtaking.

Throughout a series of bold adventures and plot twists, the author remains at her core a spiritual pilgrim. Although acknowledging that her very existence is indeed mystifying, she never ceases to question it. On this journey, she commits to going deep, going hard, and most predictively going alone, as she accepts that she must.

Readers will recall their own poignant "firsts" revisited in the author's account. They will be invited to reflect upon historically and culturally notable events from the past century. All experienced and examined through the lens of a girl who is growing up in the swirl of it all every moment of every day. It is her story, but it is an American story, a woman's story. A story of revelations, experiences, and consequences. The reader might find themselves harking back to where and who they were when these pivotal episodes occurred in their own lives. A whirring newsreel of intimate vignettes animates the page.

The writer appears as both protagonist and narrator, voyeur and exhibitionist, mentor and student. Her antagonists emerge as the relentless passage of time, her search for her own authenticity, and a universe curiously intent on taking jabs at her, requiring she "put up her dukes." All through her life, she travels back, peeks into hushed rooms, discovers her younger self waiting there prepared to tell her the truth. That child will become her master and her muse. That child will bear witness.

The author comes to understand that a woman's heartbeat is inseparable from the pulse of the universe, her existence woven into the fabric of life. And she allows that living in a body is not easy for those who remember the life of the spirit. She accepts that for women, this is the eternal quest, finally avowing that our stories matter.

Within these pages, we are allowed to take a walk with the author back through a bygone era and one gal's profoundly human narrative.