The Diary Of An Ordinary Woman

This should really be the title of my blog but I am actually referring to a book I just read by Margaret Forster.

In the foreward the author tells us how she received a call from a woman who had kept a diary from the age of 13 to 94. This woman wanted to meet to discuss the possiblity of publishing her diaries.

Millicent King was born in London in 1901 and her diary begins in 1914 and goes all the way to 1995. As I read the introduction I got chills imagining the story I was about to discover of a woman's life that stretched almost throughout the entire 20th century. I couldn't wait to begin.

The book did not disappoint. I had to put the book down several times just to stop and process what I was reading. She lived through 2 World Wars, Communism, and the advent of Feminism. She loved, she lost, she was depressed, she was happy. She celebrated V-E day, she walked in Feminist marches and protested against the building and testing of nuclear bombs. She never made a major contribution to history or did anything to change the course of history. She was nobody.

And yet, she was everybody. Margaret Forster referred to her as "The Unknown Woman", a fitting comparison to "The Unkown Soldier".

The book ends with another meeting between Millicent and the author to discuss the diaries shortly before Millicent's death in January 2000.

I cried when I finished the afterword. I had been so affected by her life. The dreams she had as a teenager did not come to fruition. The life she imagined she would have she didn't. Sometimes she was full of self pity. Sometimes she was all grit and determination. Sometimes she just wrote about her garden. She longed for life and love and adventure and she got all three. It just didn't always look like she imagined it would. Sometimes I was frustrated with her because I felt she was wasting her life and letting opportunities pass her by. Other times her unassuming heroism would make me catch my breath. She was so brave and yet she felt so ordinary. I found her story incredibly inspiring.

I reread her last few diary entries and the afterword several times not ready to put down the book and let go. I flipped the page and read thoroughly through the bibliography. I even flipped the very last page that's almost always blank. And there I saw it. An Author's Note.

"This book began as described in the first two pages of the introduction, but I never did meet the woman in question. She cancelled our meeting at the last minute because of some family objections. I was already so looking forward to her diaries that I decided to overcome my disappointment by pretending I had indeed obtained and read them. The result is fiction. The real "Millicent" has since died and though her diaries exist, I have never read them."

Fiction? FICTION?

I had just become emotionally involved and attached to a work of fiction?! I had loved and cried and lost and lived not alongside an amazing woman but a work of FICTION?!

I felt so cheated. I still feel cheated. Right from the introduction the entire book is written as truth. But it is not Millicent's truth and it was "Millicent's" truth that I found so compelling. It was like the time I found out Santa Claus wasn't real. Hugh tried to console me by saying that it probably was the amalgamation of truth about women of that time. Well good for them. They should have kept a diary then.

Would I recommend this book? I don't have enough emotional distance yet to be able to be objective. You'll have to decide whether its worth a read or not.