My mother told me never to read her diaries...and even after she'd been gone for decade it felt strange to consider it. But there I was, locked inside as COVID raged, holding a stack of her tattered black-and-white cardboard notebooks in my lap. I opened the first cover and started reading. It was like meeting my mother for the first time.
The frustrated, overwhelmed housewife I'd known and sometimes resented had harbored bigger dreams than raising five children. She was a genuine romantic who developed overwhelming crushes on men and dragged her portfolio around New York indefatigably, in pursuit of work and the financial freedom it would provide her.
Shortly after I left home, my mother's career as an author and illustrator of children's books took flight. She found a publisher for The Wednesday Witch, which would go on to sell more than a million copies, and followed it up with twenty-eight more books over thirty years.
As I closed the cover of her final notebook, I realized that the life of Ruth Chew had been more complicated, more poignant, and more impressive than I'd ever dreamed. I determined then and there to describe and share it.
My mother told me never to read her diaries...and even after she'd been gone for decade it felt strange to consider it. But there I was, locked inside as COVID raged, holding a stack of her tattered black-and-white cardboard notebooks in my lap. I opened the first cover and started reading. It was like meeting my mother for the first time.
The frustrated, overwhelmed housewife I'd known and sometimes resented had harbored bigger dreams than raising five children. She was a genuine romantic who developed overwhelming crushes on men and dragged her portfolio around New York indefatigably, in pursuit of work and the financial freedom it would provide her.
Shortly after I left home, my mother's career as an author and illustrator of children's books took flight. She found a publisher for The Wednesday Witch, which would go on to sell more than a million copies, and followed it up with twenty-eight more books over thirty years.
As I closed the cover of her final notebook, I realized that the life of Ruth Chew had been more complicated, more poignant, and more impressive than I'd ever dreamed. I determined then and there to describe and share it.
You donāt know how famous I am were the first words out of Motherās mouth when I picked her up at the airport. It was the mid-1980s and sheād been regaling me with the fact that the woman next to her on the plane was a big fan of her books.
She was right. Motherās fame never ceased to surprise me once I understood the extent of it. Throughout my childhood in Brooklyn, sheād been a frustrated stay-at-home mother of five children born between 1949 and 1957. (I was number two.) After the birth of number threeāmy brother Georgeāsheād become overwhelmed and had no time for creative endeavors. Sheād had groceries delivered and had thought nothing of sending out her tiny tots to run errands. In the evenings, sheād doze off folding mountains of cloth diapers on the dining-room table.Ā Ā
I was a freshman in college at MIT in 1969, when Scholastic published Motherās first book and witnessed only bits of her struggle to get it published because I didnāt live at home my senior year of high school. (Iād spent that year with my Aunt Audrey in Los Alamosāa complex story that I tell in my book about her, Dearest Audrey). While attending MIT, I spent as little time in Brooklyn as possible. Like many teenagers and young adults, I found my parentsā questions to be intrusive and their guidance annoying. Mother mailed me an autographed copy of The Wednesday Witch, and of each of her successive books as they came out at the rate of about one per year. I lined them up on a shelf and didnāt even bother to read most of them. By 1998, Scholastic had published twenty-nine.Ā
Ā
By the late 1990s, my father had died, and I and all my siblings had moved away. When Mother could no longer care for herself, my younger brother, George, brought her to California so that I could supervise her care. He packed up her treasuresā including her many mysterious diariesāand shipped them to me. I call them āmysteriousā because Iād been admonished as a child never to read them or even peek into themāand I never had.
After an early false start, on New Yearās Day 1934, when she was thirteen, Mother began a steadfast ritual of recording her thoughts daily. She maintained the practice until 2001. Over the years, when I asked her what she wrote about, she claimed the journals held nothing of interest; they were just a dry record of the events of the day.Ā I would discover later that, while sheād always preached the importance of telling the truth, she hadnāt been completely forthcoming about the contents of these personal volumes.
After Motherās death in 2010 of multiple old-age woes including sepsis, pneumonia, digestive tract bleeding, and dementia, dust accumulated on the diaries as I debated their fate. The volumes vary wildly in size and style. Some are tiny and others large canvas-bound ledgers. About half of them are inexpensive pasteboard-bound composition notebooks like the ones I used in elementary school. Except for a couple of childrenās diaries that she received as gifts, she wrote in whatever inexpensive notebook she could find.
Had the ban on reading them expired with her death? Daddy and her friends were dead, too. What was the harm in reading them now? I started peeking inside, gingerly at first, telling myself that I merely wanted to learn about a few events of special interest. But the process was frustrating. As the anecdotes were written for her eyes alone, characters appeared without introduction and story lines splintered. There was no way Iād be able to sample my motherās writingsāIād have to dive in and immerse myself in her life. When COVID-19 struck and locked us all inside, that is exactly what I didāchronologically, from start to finish.Ā
It didnāt take me long to realize that I had opened Pandoraās box.
What I learned from the diaries that seemed worth sharing here is supplemented by my memories and those of my siblings. I have also become the custodian of her keepsakes, unpublished manuscripts, letters, and artworkāincluding her illustrations and cover art. Iām lucky to have a large house but wonder what will become of all these things, beyond the selection of words and images I have chosen to include here. I hope that someone in the family wants them and will continue to care for them when I am no longer able to do so.
Due to repetitive carryover between chapters, I vacillated between a three- and four-star review rating. However, I landed on a four-star review due to this book's rawness. It's a raw real that may make you hold your breath, stagger, and sway, but you won't be able to look away!
Be warned: If you write daily diary entries, you might want to burn them before you die. "Oh my!" It's not that anything shared by Ruth Chew's daughter is overly solatious; however, very little about her diary entries reflects well on her. As her daughter shares, it seems that most of Ruth's life was lived in a state not far beyond adolescence. This might be why she was so successfully able to tap into what children would be entertained by when reading; however, it didn't always serve her well in other areas of her life.
An aspect of this book I appreciated and was drawn to immensely was the time and space in history in which Ruth Chew wrote and the greats of the illustrator and literary world, which her circle included. Having never read "Wednesday Witch" or any subsequent books in the series, I wasn't sure if there would be any work of Ruth's that I might have purchased as a young, avid reader. I was amazed to discover that "Shark Lady" was illustrated by Ruth! I still have the original book with my maiden name scrawled into it. It was a book that amazed me. Now, I'm equally amazed to learn more of the behind-the-scenes aspects of Ruth taking on something outside of her expertise that she could execute so well.
As a writer and mother myself, with an illustrator daughter among my four children, I consider Eve Sprunt's book a cautionary tale. "Passionate Persistence" may pay dividends work-wise, but it must be applied to more than creative energies that pay you! "Passionate Persistence" is best served when pursuing your children, pledging to mother well, and to love them unconditionally, not one above another, but without comparison. You cannot have them only to leave them, thinking that this is okay, that they will make good choices and be able to fend for themselves. It's a rare individual, such as the author of this book, Eve, who can raise herself to be something more than what was bestowed upon her/withheld from her as a child.
Ruth Chew's entire life while a triumph also was a nightmare. A dichotomy that must have been horrible to exist in for everyone around her. I cringed throughout my reading of this book. I felt immense sorrow for the children left behind to struggle or succeed beyond anyone's wildest dreams only to go unrecognized as having done anything spectacular, special, or great. Each child is set up to fail, not to get along, to have distance between everyone they should have been close to, and to be robbed of family in the traditional sense. Left to flounder, be enabled in bad behaviors, or succeed on their own without praise, all paths lead to emptiness, feelings of not being good enough, paths of bitterness.
While this book might be cathartic for the family of Ruth Chew to read. For someone outside of the family structure- without knowing Ruth's work as an author, had I been a fan of her writings, I believe I would have preferred the curtain never to have been pulled back. Authors and artists of all varieties are often revered. Still, when the curtain is lifted on Ruth Chew's life, there is not much to admire outside of her persistence to pave her way, not give up, and try and try again until doors open and mountains move, and she begins to deal with women in place of archaic men.
Ruth Chew's "Passionate Persistence" to complete what she was put on earth to do is noteworthy; however, to what end? To reach an apex of glory while consistently being besotted with older men stains what could have been triumphal and creates complications that stain and take away. Outside of persistence, what is there to revere? Better to work on one craft, from project to project, with life in between that serves those around you with love, care, and affection, standing in the gap when problems arise to do more than put a bandaid on a situation but to go to the root of the problem and get everyone the help they were crying out to receive.
Egads! It truly is a love/hate relationship I have with this book! Should it have been written, or should the diaries have remained untouched and hidden? To flesh out an author, is that what we need, or is it better to let the readers of their books remain in the worlds that they were immersed in, to begin with, and never know the truth behind the words written?