This Life Is in Your Hands
One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Lyrical and down-to-earth, wry and heartbreaking, This Life Is in Your Hands is a fascinating and powerful memoir. Melissa Coleman doesn’t just tell the story of her family’s brave experiment and private tragedy; she brings to life an important and underappreciated chapter of our recent history.” —Tom Perrotta
In a work of power and beauty reminiscent of Tobias Wolff, Jeannette Walls, and Dave Eggers, Melissa Coleman delivers a luminous, evocative childhood memoir exploring the hope and struggle behind her family's search for a sustainable lifestyle. With echoes of The Liars’ Club and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Coleman’s searing chronicle tells the true story of her upbringing on communes and sustainable farms along the rugged Maine coastline in the 1970’s, embedded within a moving, personal quest for truth that her experiences produced.
What happens when the search for a perfect life uncovers an unbearable loss?
The Back-to-the-Land Dream: Inspired by homesteading legends Helen and Scott Nearing, the Coleman family carves a life of self-sufficiency from sixty rugged acres on the coast of Maine.An Off-the-Grid Childhood: A vivid, clear-eyed account of growing up in the 1970s without electricity or running water, where nature was both a playground and a formidable force.A Shattered Paradise: When a devastating accident strikes the family, their idyllic experiment is fractured, leaving the author to piece together the truth of what happened.A Daughter's Search for Truth: A searingly honest exploration of grief and survival in a family determined to live outside the bounds of conventional society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With urban farming and backyard chicken flocks becoming increasingly popular, Coleman has written this timely and honest portrait of her own childhood experience in Maine with her two homesteading parents during the turbulent 1970s. Inspired by the back-to-the-land lifestyle of Scott and Helen Nearing, Coleman's parents, Sue and Eliot, decided to create their own idyllic reality on 60 acres of land in Maine that was sold to them by the Nearing family for a token sum. While Coleman emphasizes the beauty of growing up in a family culture that valued the bounty of nature and freedom of expression, she does not hesitate to also expose farming's detrimental effect on family life her own well-being as well as the accidental death of her younger sister.
