Living Memories
Recalling brushes with immense figures and moments in history, Living Memories is a singular memoir.
A record of an extraordinary life, Nellie Gail Moulton’s memoir Living Memories is about moving across the prairie in a covered wagon and experiencing major historical events and world travel.
Moulton was born in 1878 and witnessed the growth and expansion of the American frontier. She lived in places including Kansas, Nebraska, and California; her family faced myriad challenges, including tornadoes, illnesses far away from physicians, and having to relocate after their towns were isolated or abandoned. Moulton herself became a passionate teacher, artist, and traveler, making lifelong friends and benefiting from mentors.
The book records Moulton’s family’s brushes with immense figures and moments in history. For example, Moulton’s father ran away to join the Union Army as a teenager, and Ulysses S. Grant recognized her grandfather in town; Abraham Lincoln bounced Moulton’s husband on his knee as a baby; and Moulton and her family experienced the first Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Moulton also writes about the wonder of riding a Ferris wheel for the first time and recalls watching the exponential, explosive growth of major metropolises including Chicago and Los Angeles. The rapid growth of the country as a whole is reflected in her life’s trajectory, from riding in a covered wagon with her father in her childhood to traveling to India by plane in her seventies.
However, individual scenes are breezed through; they follow one another in quick succession. Complex emotions are flattened in service of the book’s speed, including the grief that Moulton experienced after losing her mother, her sister, and her husband over the span of her life. There are mentions of relationships that Moulton developed as a teacher, a daughter, and a mother, but these, too, are listed rather than elaborated upon.
Further, there are several redundancies, including in the section dedicated to world travels, which is followed by a section dedicated to “flights,” or times that Moulton traveled by air to places including Japan, England, Italy, and California. These sections both come after the timeline of her life, and the same journeys are discussed two or three separate times without adding any new information. Still, taken in total, the book does a momentous job of portraying a singular life, moving from prairie travel to experiences in trains, boats, and planes and covering all of the exhilarating personal discoveries that occurred in between.
Living Memories is an idiosyncratic memoir about a woman’s remarkable life.
Reviewed by
Natalie Wollenzien
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
