The Optimist's Daughter
Judge McKelva of Mount Salus, Mississippi, goes down to a New Orleans clinic in March to have a detached retina repaired, and his daughter comes from Chicago to sit out the recovery beside his second wife, a Texan half her age who cannot bear to keep still. The funeral brings the town and its opinions into the house Laurel grew up in, and the days she then spends there alone with her mother's letters and her father's desk force a reckoning she had arranged her whole life to avoid. It took the Pulitzer Prize and was the last novel Eudora Welty published, having begun as a magazine story written after the deaths of her own mother and brother.
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- 51% · 12 shared