"Holtz captures the essence of family, tracing the way in which, through the generations, strengths, weaknesses, habits, and particular needs are passed down. This is a deeply considered and honest work of universal import."—Kirkus

"It is common today for reviewers to say that a book is beautifully written. This one truly is. Great care has gone into the shaping of every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter, with a concern for preserving the accents of the author's speaking voice. It is a book for reading aloud, for sharing with a loved one: partner, companion, friend, another family member, as one might share one's own family recollections. . . . It will become a classic in the rich literature of the memoir."—Robert A. Erickson

As a child, William Holtz was fascinated with the Greek myth of the autochthonous warriors rising parentless from the earth; and as a young man, self-consciously lifting himself out of the Depression-era poverty of his parents' life, he often thought of himself as essentially self-created, independent of the family he was born into. More recently, in late middle age, Holtz has found himself reassessing his place in his family. The result is a deeply moving, lyrical, and sensitive memoir.

In Gathering the Family the author re-creates scenes and episodes from his early life with his family. Although he begins his work as a biographer, Holtz comes to turn his researcher's eye on himself, frankly examining his thoughts of the family he grew up with. These interlocking essays examine the lives of his mother's struggling Finnish immigrant parents, who spoke no English; of his father's large, festive German American family; and of his doomed, laughing father, his gentle, overburdened mother, and his self-destructive younger brother. The intertwining effects of heredity, circumstance, and choice in individual lives are played out poignantly as he discovers that the family he was so troubled by in his youth has made him what he has become today.

Every reader will come to care deeply about the family members Holtz portrays and will be reminded of personal and formative family experiences. Gathering the Family will compel each of us to rexamine our own places in the families that have shaped our lives.

"It must have been the following spring that the first door fell off the car. The winter roads were frozen into washboard ruts; the car rattled in an irregular rhythm over the whole four miles twice a day, and the doors loosened and got harder to close. Halfway to town was a railroad-grade crossing, a steep rise and fall in the road. It was just possible to take the crossing fast enough to get a thrill in the pit of the stomach. Probably I had learned this because my father had done it once deliberately. Each time we approached the crossing I shouted for my father to speed up; my mother would say please don't and my father would laugh and tromp the accelerator and we would leap and drop over the crossing. I suspect we were airborne a couple of times; certainly we were the time we hit the road with a lurch that tore the wheel from my father's hands momentarily. The door on my mother's side flew open and hung by one hinge. We came home very slowly. "Nineteen-twenty-nine was the last year Fischer Body made wooden doorposts for the Chevrolet chassis they supplied to General Motors, my father explained to me. He managed to reattach the door temporarily, but the car was doomed. Hinge screws would not hold in the rotted wooden doorposts, and by summer all four doors were gone. The canvas roof began to leak through onto the seats, and one day a strong wind peeled a corner of the roof back into a flapping rag. My father bought another car he thought he could repair if he could find a carburetor for it; meantime, the Chevrolet was air-conditioned, he said, just right for summer driving. He cut the remaining body off just above the seats, making it into a roadster. The seats by now were moldering sponges, so he took them out, replacing the back seat with an old wagon bench and the front seat with two kitchen chairs screwed to the floorboards. My mother rode in silent terror, but I thought it was a purely wonderful car, and it began a wonderful, terrible summer. "My father did not have to be at work until late afternoon, and in the heat of the summer he would take us all to the swimming beach at Grey Lake. From midmorning until well past noon my sister and I could swim; there were usually a few other families there on the same schedule; my mother would read a magazine and lay out a picnic lunch while my father talked and laughed with other men from the factory who worked the same shift. Then we would speed home just in time for him to make the return trip to work. My father had lost the radiator cap after one of the many refillings and had replaced it with a tin can; on the Fourth of July some practical joker in the paint shop at the factory had painted it red, white, and blue and had done the same to the wheels, as well as to my father's lunch pail. The muffler was gone and the engine roared like a tractor; the hot exhaust flared against the wooden floorboards and one day set them and our picnic basket on fire beneath my mother's feet; in a flurry of charred boards and smoldering towels and the burnt remains of sandwiches my father beat out the flames with wet bathing suits and, wrapping his hands in towels, broke off the exhaust pipe at the manifold. Day after day we roared along the country roads. The wind blew our hair dry, I made a banner of my towel, and everyone we passed would smile and wave. One day we racketed through a white cloud of chickens down the road from a farmhouse. My father leaned to his left and made a quick grab, and suddenly a flopping Leghorn was in the car with us; a twist of the wrist and its neck was broken and it lay beneath my feet in the back seat. No one had a car like ours. My mother hoped the other car would be running by winter."

About the Author

William Holtz is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author or editor of several books, including the widely acclaimed The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane and Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship, Letters, 1921-1960.