What made you?
On loving and learning from problematic faves
“Name five books that made you” the prompt demands.
I can remember how my body felt that summer. The confusion of divorce, unthinkable to Good Christians, the long drive, us kids piled into Mom’s car, the hills of Kansas giving way to the lakes of Minnesota. I remember my mom crying beside her friend, while the friend’s daughter, bold and tackless as kids are, whispered to me “I don’t think she should be married to someone like that.” I was a young teen burdened by knowledge, increasingly parentified, seething at injustice, and aching with loneliness, and on that trip, I was introduced to an author.
Reading The Girl of the Limberlost, Gene Stratton Porter’s story of an unwanted daughter who finds solace in the natural world and titular Indiana swamp gave me a road map. Things would be alright, eventually, and until they were, I could go to the woods, something I already gravitated to. I felt seen, comforted, encouraged. So I found more books from this long dead author: Freckles, who later appears in TGOTL, well into his HEA, The Harvester, about an herbalist who supplies plants to pharmacies and saves the woman he loves through heavy application of the natural world. I was enthralled. Gene was a birder! A conservationist! She wrote about nature in ways that spurred my curiosity. A woman of her own, as well as wife and mother. She was everything I wanted to be.
And then I started searching for her more obscure books. Things that had given me pause in Freckles were more prominent in At the Foot of the Rainbow, the strengths and weaknesses of each of the men being attributed to his racial heritage. But since both men were white, and teenage me had no frame of reference for this kind of racism, I waved it away.
And then in my early twenties, I found Michael O’Halloran. I can still feel how my gut sank as I read the racial slurs and the diatribes about out-birthing certain populations, saving the nation through whiteness and clean living. By now, I knew enough to recognize the ideology, and when I looked a little deeper into The Bird Woman of the Limberlost, I found, alongside all those admirable qualities, a staunch eugenicist, white nationalist, and virulent racist, and damnably, the logic she used was logic I recognized.
It’s never a pleasant feeling to realize that people you love and trust have been parrotting talking points from the American movement that gave us forced sterilizations, racial immigration quotas, and formed the foundation of Nazism. The Patriot Act had kickstarted my exit from the political right, rampant corruption from the religious right, but this was the moment I realized how entrenched the poison that is white nationalism really is.
Of the authors that made me, Gene Stratton Porter is undeniably one, and I don’t regret that. Reading her odes to the natural world, especially when I did, was deeply healing. And then, discovering the broader, terrible range of her beliefs, the way her books slowly moved from propaganda for the healing abilities of nature to propaganda for the “proper realization of the white man’s right to supremacy?”1 That was a gift all its own.
It was through Gene Stratton-Porter that I gained a broader understanding of the racism baked into our country and the historical context for what we are seeing today. Because of her books, I recognized the crunchy to alt-right pipeline and MAHA’s role in Trump’s facism immediately. The Harvester is MAHA’s handbook, a presentation of the beautiful dream facism presents to the in-crowd. Who wouldn’t want safe food, clean medicine, and the ability to recuperate from illness, weakness and the exhaustion of modern life in a gorgeous natural setting? But because her work also included openly racist rhetoric, I saw the dog whistles. It highlighted, for me, how closely the two can go hand in hand.
There’s a lot of hand-wringing about the books kids read, and let me be clear, I do think it’s important for kids to read diverse stories and diverse protagonists. I’ve been proactive about this with my own kids from the beginning. But this “books that made you” exercise has been a reminder for me that books can make us in a number of ways, that a problematic author or book alone doesn’t derail a person’s trajectory and transform an innocent child into a racist. It can, in fact, help do the opposite. Gene Stratton Porter would hate the impact she’s had on me.
We contain multitudes. It’s tempting to flatten this, easier to deny it, but when we do that, we are at risk of creating us and them categories, and in that scenario, no one ever wins.
I’m linking several resources below. My family has used these to not only find good children’s literature, but to pair problematic classics like The Little House series with better books, like The Birchbark House, and then facilitate conversations about narrative, propaganda, and bias as we read.
I can’t say enough about the Book Lists from What do we do all day. I tend to use her website rather than IG, but have linked both.
Nicole is a really lovely human as well as amazing resource:
Focused more on picture books, this is a great resource for the younger crowd:
Her Father’s Daughter, published in 1921, reads like a fictionalized eugenics handbook. Also like a press release from the current administration.