Nevermore: Obituary Writer, Midwife of Hope River, and My Own Country

Two fiction books and a non-fictional account about this area dominated a recent meeting of Nevermore.

The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood intertwines the lives of two women separated by place and time.  In 1919, Vivien is still searching for the love of her life, an already married man who disappeared years earlier in the San Francisco earthquake.  She now writes obituaries to help others cope with their own losses as she continues to grieve her own.  The second part of the story is set in 1963, where wife and mother Claire is fascinated by Jackie Kennedy, who seems so glamorous.  Claire is restless, feeling that she wants more from life—and from her marriage to a man she’s no longer sure she loves.  Our reviewer was quite taken with this book and with the way the lives of the two women converge.  She highly recommends this book, and compares it to The Postmistress by Sarah Blake.

The Midwife of Hope River is set in Depression-era West Virginia, where Patience Murphy works as a midwife, delivering babies for poor families no matter their race or ethnicity.  Patience is hiding secrets of her own, however, and is afraid that her past may catch up with her sooner rather than later. Author Patricia Harmon, a midwife herself, has written a riveting and uplifting book that employs the social conditions and mores of the time to good effect:  striking miners, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, etc.  While the details are authentic, Harmon doesn’t resort to writing in dialect to give the flavor of the place. This novel has been read by several Nevermore members, earning praise all around. Fans of Call the Midwife (both memoir by Jennifer Worth and the PBS series based on the book) might enjoy this one, which has many of the same themes in a different setting.

A modern, non-fictional book about medicine in Appalachia also caught the attention of a Nevermore reader. My Own Country:  A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese tells of his experiences as a doctor in Johnson City, Tennessee when a strange disease begins showing up: a peculiar and frightening auto-immune disease that will become known as AIDS.  Verghese writes beautifully, with a discerning eye and compassion toward both his patients and toward his new home in Appalachia, which carries a bit of culture shock.  This is another book that has received near universal praise and recommendation for its insights and sensitivity. My Own Country first came out some years ago, but the library continues to have to buy replacement copies due to the book’s popularity. Verghese has continued to write, most recently producing an acclaimed novel entitled Cutting for Stone.