All the Pretty Things by Edie Wadsworth | featured memoir
{The best kind of story is that which not only conveys a fascinating tale but also provides insight into the reader’s situation. That’s what All the Pretty Things did for me.}
All the Pretty Things: The Story of a Southern Girl Who Went Through Fire to Find Her Way Home by Edie Wadsworth
The book: (from the publisher) “I don’t know how old I was the night the trailer burned down, or if the rumor was true that Daddy was the one who set it on fire.”
For a long time, Edie thought she had escaped. It started in an Appalachian trailer park, where a young girl dreamed of becoming a doctor. But every day, Edie woke up to her reality:a poverty-stricken world full of alcohol and violence, where getting out seemed impossible. She taught herself to drive a stick shift truck at twelve years old so she could get her drunk daddy home from the bar. She spent Saturdays at Brushy Mountain prison visiting her incarcerated cousin. She watched adults eat while her stomach gnawed and then there was torching of the family trailer, where she dug through the ashes to try to salvage her most prized possession–her Tammy Wynette album.
And at the center of it all was her charismatic daddy. She never knew when he would show up but when he did he was usually drunk; she learned the hard way that she couldn’t count on him to protect her. So she told herself it didn’t matter. All she wanted was to make him proud. Against all odds, Edie “made doctor,” achieving everything that had once seemed beyond her reach. Only, it was too late, because her Daddy died a year before she graduated medical school. She split the cost of his funeral with her sister.
When her past finally caught up with her, it was all too much so she did what her Daddy would have done–she set it all on fire.
It would take her whole life burning down once again for Edie to be finally able to face the truth about herself, her family, and her relationship with God. Readers of The Glass Castle will treasure this refreshing and raw redemption story, a memoir for anyone who has ever hungered for home, forgiveness, and the safe embrace of a father’s love.
The author: Edie Wadsworth is a speaker, writer, and blogger who has been featured in various print and 
online media (including Better Homes and Gardens in 2013 on the topic of her family’s home rebuild after a fire). After overcoming her difficult upbringing to become a successful medical doctor, Edie left her practice to raise her family and pursue her love for writing. Her passion is to love her people well and to see women embrace the full measure of their life’s passion and purpose. She has shared her story at conferences and churches around the country. Edie is a Compassion International blogger who traveled to Nicaragua in 2013. She blogs at lifeingraceblog.com on a variety of topics that center themselves on home–including vocation, hospitality, faith, parenting, cooking, and life in the Appalachian South.
Genre: Non-fiction/Christian/Memoir
Reminds me of: Sober Mercies: How Love Caught Up with a Christian Drunk by Heather Kopp
[Tweet “A powerful memoir told with hard honesty and deep affection @oilysisterhood @TyndaleHouse”]
Reflection: Curiosity compelled me to read this memoir of a Southern girl whose dysfunctional relationship with her daddy cast a shadow over her entire life until God’s grace caught up with her, healing, empowering, and transforming her into someone wholly different. I wanted to read it because the author’s situation, superficially at least, reminded me of someone I know. A woman who, despite my many years of knowing her, remains an enigma. In reading Edie’s story, I sought insights into this woman’s life, and therefore into my relationship with her.
Few will be able to relate to the specifics of Edie’s story (which, for your average American woman, are pretty much off the charts), but every willing reader will find resonance in her themes. These are universal: the longing to be known and loved. To belong. And the angst that results when a parent loves you well but cannot meet your deepest emotional needs because of his or her own brokenness.
I teared up when I read Edie’s account of the first, nerve-wracking time she shared her story with an audience — touched in part because of her story, but even more so because of the truth she discovered:
“that the painful parts of our lives are often the very things that God will use as gifts to bless and change us and the people we meet.” (page 134)
Edie then goes on to describe in some detail the long road of hard forgiveness on her way to healing. She says,
“I learned to hold my compassion for Daddy and my wounds from him in the same heart.” (page 244)
There’s also this, as she quotes the doctor who helped her climb out of the pit:
“Most people are just doing the best they can with what they’ve been given. You never know what someone’s struggles are.” (page 246)
Edie’s articulation of these relational truths showed me the way to feel greater compassion toward toward not only one particular person in my life, but many. I am grateful.
I can only begin to guess the cost of penning a memoir like Edie’s — deeply personal, deeply vulnerable. I’ve talked to other memoirists who have said it took them years before they could write meaningfully about pain in their lives because they needed a certain degree of emotional distance that only time could provide. That distance seems here to be quite slender, and as a result, Edie’s story quite raw. Which is where, I believe, it draws so much of its power.
Thanks to Tyndale House Publishers for providing me a free copy. All opinions are mine.
After words: When did curiosity last drive you to read a book?