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REVIEWS
DEAR MEDORA: CHILD OF OYSTERVILLE'S FORGOTTEN YEARS
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by Sydney Stevens
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| Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2007. Illustrations, photographs, maps, index. 180 pages. $24.95 paper. |
| After the funeral, a universal problem comes knocking: what will happen to all that old stuff — all those pictures, diaries, letters, albums? The H.A. Espy family who founded Oysterville, Washington, apparently solved this problem by creating a family archive, for, as Sydney Stevens writes in her preface, "when finally gathered together, they [Espy family papers] filled ninety large cardboard cartons" (p. 3). From those cartons, Stevens, a retired grade school teacher, was given the boxes containing her aunt Medora Espy's (1899–1916) adolescent correspondence and diaries: "thousands of Medora letters! Boxes of them — letters to and from family members, distant relatives, friends, acquaintances, even strangers" (p. 3). Stevens came to live and write in her grandparents' Oysterville home — the same rooms where that archive is housed, the same rooms where Medora, the oldest daughter in a family of six children, grew up. |
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Dear Medora is, in fact, the second book to use that Espy Family Archive, the first being Oysterville: Roads to Grandpa's Village (C.N. Potter, 1977), a widely praised and reprinted family history by Willard R. Espy, Medora's younger brother, Reader's Digest editor, and author of sixteen books. Unlike the scale, style, gender balance, and narrative complexity of Oysterville, Stevens intentionally limits and focuses her book to "give a picture of Medora's world as she found it" (p. 4). In her preface and first chapter, Stevens briefly summarizes the Espy family's background and the remote village of Oysterville. Then, in eight chapters, she chronicles the Espy family's experience between 1908 and 1916, foregrounding Medora's coming-of-age during that same eight years (except for a twenty-two–month void between 1909 and 1911). In the final chapter, Stevens documents Medora's death shortly after her seventeenth birthday but omits the cause of her death given in Oysterville. In her afterword, the author summarizes the biographies of Medora's five siblings, and so completes the frame around one portrait of the Espy family. |
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Readers should know that Dear Medora is composed of two kinds of materials: about half the pages are transcripts and family photographs, and about half are interpretive commentary. In the former, the author weaves together some seventy-eight short letters by Medora, some eighty-four short letters by her "Mama" (Helen Richardson 1878–1954), some ninety short transcripts from Medora's boycrazy diaries, and over one hundred black and white photographs. To help readers follow the trail through that forest of photos and transcripts, Stevens adds about eighty-one pages of elementary signposts: chapter introductions, sixty-three sidebars, token footnotes, charts, drawings, and a map. While there is candor, immediacy, and daily revelation in this mix, not all readers will have the patience or time required to stitch together all those pieces. |
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Privately subsidized and published in oversized format (9-by-10 1/2 inches), this book may be characterized as an amateur biographical collage. Valuable for documenting Victorian family relationships, Dear Medora may be best appreciated as a portable Espy Museum Home exhibit. The author becomes a decorous family archivist, explaining one glass wall display of original materials about a rural girl who was her aunt: her coming-of-age; her quest for status, propriety, education, romance; and her sudden death. For the comprehensive family narrative about this white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant girl who emigrated from California to the Pacific Northwest, readers may want to first read Oysterville, where Willard candidly reveals the larger context of the Espy family struggle against illness, isolation, pregnancy, over-fishing, ignorance, privation, weather, poverty, financial disaster, accidents, tides, and loneliness. |
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| George Venn
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| Eastern Oregon University |
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