Private LifeNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres—and “one of her generation’s most eloquent chroniclers of ordinary familial love” (The New York Times)—comes a “masterly…compelling depiction of a singular woman,” (The New Yorker), from her childhood in post–Civil War Missouri to California in the throes of World War II. Here is the powerful, deeply affecting story of one Margaret Mayfield. When Margaret marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early at the age of twenty-seven, she narrowly avoids condemning herself to life as an old maid. Instead, knowing little about marriage and even less about her husband, she moves with Andrew to his naval base in California. Margaret stands by Andrew during tragedies both historical and personal, but as World War II approaches and the secrets of her husband’s scientific and academic past begin to surface, she is forced to reconsider the life she had so carefully constructed. A riveting and nuanced novel of marriage and family, Private Life reveals the mysteries of intimacy and the anonymity that endures even in lives lived side by side. |
Contents
Section 1 | 3 |
Section 2 | 19 |
Section 3 | 22 |
Section 4 | 26 |
Section 5 | 34 |
Section 6 | 36 |
Section 7 | 71 |
Section 8 | 91 |
Section 19 | 189 |
Section 20 | 209 |
Section 21 | 210 |
Section 22 | 223 |
Section 23 | 224 |
Section 24 | 245 |
Section 25 | 252 |
Section 26 | 261 |
Section 9 | 105 |
Section 10 | 111 |
Section 11 | 115 |
Section 12 | 128 |
Section 13 | 142 |
Section 14 | 165 |
Section 15 | 169 |
Section 16 | 174 |
Section 17 | 178 |
Section 18 | 181 |
Section 27 | 284 |
Section 28 | 287 |
Section 29 | 305 |
Section 30 | 325 |
Section 31 | 337 |
Section 32 | 349 |
Section 33 | 353 |
Section 34 | 397 |
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Common terms and phrases
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