Read Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm Online
Authors: Mardi Jo Link
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Adult, #Biography
All of our guests are giggling or at least grinning. All five of our sons are laughing so hard that not one of them is standing up straight. My father has his arm around my mother and her mouth is open in an O, but she is smiling too, as big as anyone.
“Is it always going to be like this when I kiss you?” I ask my new husband.
I ask him this softly, while people are laughing, and I speak it close to his ear so no one else can hear me.
“Most women would be happy with fireworks,” he whispers back. “Or rice, or a honeymoon.”
“I’m not most women.”
“Don’t I know it.”
I look into his whole face and remind myself,
Be aware of your surroundings
. And I will this moment to last. I will it into a present that I can open again and again whenever I want to. Inside will be the laughter of our sons and the safety of our little farm and a love so surprising it feels just like the blast of a horn.
This is a work of nonfiction. The events depicted really happened and really happened to my sons and me. I wish some of them hadn’t, but to quote my wise grandpa Hain, “Sometimes you just get what you get.”
All dialogue is from memory, and I’ve been told that I have a pretty good one for that kind of thing—a level of recall that has inspired observations such as “Man, you never forget
anything
, do you?”
Some names have been changed, and there is one composite character: Pecker the rooster. Dates, facts, and dollar amounts are from district court records, tax returns, public-school attendance records, a police report, insurance papers, a divorce decree, canceled checks, shutoff notices, concert tickets, land deeds, welldrilling invoices, a mortgage application, and wedding photos.
If you are a single mother in the heartland, trying to make a go of your questionable choices while writing about them, here is what I would suggest:
First, raise a trio of undaunted sons like Owen, Luke, and Will. Raise sons unafraid of dirt, cold, their mother’s tears, public opinion, or hard work. Raise sons who celebrate with you, when you have secured a book deal, by cheering, as Will did, in this way: “Yeah! No more government cheese!”
Raise sons who love you despite your ridiculous self, who support your writing by turning down their guitar amplifiers during your working hours. Raise sons who you just know will be the very best kind of men when they are grown—smart, compassionate, funny, and resourceful. (I’d tell you how good-looking they are, too, except that I still have to live with them.)
But even before that, have Marylyn and Chuck Link as your parents, and Florence Link and Richard Hain as your grandparents. These capable people will not tolerate your smart mouth or you rolling your sarcastic teenage eyes, but will take you to dude ranches and on wilderness horseback trips, send you to journalism school (and pay for it), buy you warm coats, pass on their cookbook and their reverence for the land, for Michigan, and will
even try to teach you the value of a dollar, which, to your peril, you will take a very long time to learn.
Next, try to carry a marriage for twenty years and fail. Swear off men forever, don’t date, and recoil in horror when your friends suggest you create something called an online dating profile. Lust after Pete instead, the cabinetmaker you hire to build an addition onto your century-old farmhouse. Fall for him hard as timber. Marry him. Proceed to love him to pieces.
Get help and good advice from writers whose talent is surpassed only by their generosity. These would include Anya Achtenberg, Fleda Brown, Elizabeth Buzzelli, Lynn Hugo, Phillip Lopate, Thomas Lynch, Richard McCann, Emily Meier, Aimé Merizon, Cari Noga, Anne-Marie Oomen, Teresa Scollon, Heather Shumaker, Aaron Stander, Doug Stanton, Keith Taylor, Carolyn Walker, and, most especially, smudge sister Mary Ellen Geist.
Raise your writer’s hand as high as you can so that you can be noticed way out here in the Midwest by the determined, smart, and miraculous Jane Dystel and everyone at DGLM. Have her show your words to editor Jordan Pavlin, a woman who hears them and understands them and teaches you that that’s the very best you can hope for as a writer: to be heard and understood; to be able to say, “This is how it was—and we survived it.”
Mardi Jo Link is the author of
When Evil Came to Good Hart
(2008) and
Isadore’s Secret
(2009), winner of the Michigan Notable Book Award. She lives with her family on a small farm in northern Michigan.
For more information, please visit
www.aaknopf.com
The introduction, author biography, discussion questions, and suggested reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of
Bootstrapper
, a memoir by Mardi Jo Link.
Bootstrapper
is the smart, hilarious, and endlessly entertaining account of one of the most difficult years in Mardi Jo Link’s life, as she awaits her divorce and struggles—among rapidly mounting obstacles—to raise her three boys and preserve the dream that she has for them all. But Link’s memoir is more than just one woman’s tale; it is a story to which any reader can relate: a testament to the journeys of self-discovery that we must all undertake as we confront seemingly impossible challenges and navigate life’s most unexpected twists and turns.
It is 2005, and Mardi Jo Link’s marriage of almost two decades is coming to a close. On the eve of her divorce from the man her friends refer to as “Mr. Wonderful,” she is faced with increasing debt and all of the problems that come with it. Her family is struggling to stay fed, stay warm, and stay positive. As soon as she finds a solution to one problem, another arises. As if that isn’t enough, Link faces the emotional tolls of separation, cycling through periods of grief, loneliness, guilt, and anger as she tries to come to terms with the path her life has taken. Day by day, she and her family must find ways to survive, as she fights desperately to maintain their way of life and save the farm that they call home. They are forced to use their ingenuity, resilience, and resolve to get by and to rebuild a dream that seems to be crashing down around them.
Unfailingly, unflinchingly, and often irreverently honest,
Bootstrapper
is not just the story of one family’s struggles on a Michigan farm, but a meditation on self-discovery, our failures and our foibles, and the ways in which we finally—with determination, humor, strength, and resolution—triumph and overcome. Weaving history and heritage with the here and now, Link’s story is a contemporary tale of the virtue that has always been an integral part of the fabric of American living—self-reliance. Finally,
Bootstrapper
is a story of love and family and the things we do to preserve what is most valuable, to keep whole the most precious parts of our selves and our lives.
Mardi Jo Link’s relentless humor, wit, and (most of all) sincerity propel us forward throughout, enlighten us, keep us moving along with her to the very end—rooting for her and the things she holds most dear, eager to reach with her the success we are certain she deserves.
1. Evaluate the epigraphs at the start of each chapter. What relationship do they have to the major themes of the book? What do they also reveal about Link’s personality, character, education, and interests?
2. In the first chapter, Link takes her children to the Cherry Festival. She lets her son try his hand at a shooting game even though she realizes it is fixed. Why is it important that she let him do this anyway, knowing he will probably fail, and why is it a significant detail that he ends up winning? Shortly afterward, a thief snatches tickets out of her son’s hand. What realization does Link come to at the conclusion of this event and their time at the Cherry Festival? How does Link develop this idea as a motif throughout the book? Where does this concept reappear within her story?
3. Why is Link so affected by the death of her horse Major? What does his death represent for her? Does her stance on this or her interpretation of this event seem to change or evolve at all by the end of the book?
4. At the time of Major’s death, Link recalls a single line of poetry, which, she says “saves me, just, from that death blow” (
this page
). In addition to this example and the epigraphs at the start of each chapter, literature and poetry is reference in many other places in the story. She recalls the poetry of Emily Dickinson, for example, at the time of her divorce hearing in
chapter 9
. With this in mind, what roles do literature and education play overall in the personal journeys and growth of Link and her sons?
5. After the death of Major, Link must sell her horse Pepper. The horse ultimately escapes from her owners and is found trapped in mud up to its chest. What meaning or symbolism does Link find in this event? What does it reveal about her own feelings and situation?
6. Evaluate the structure of the book and consider the chapter titles Link has chosen. What period of time is represented in each chapter and in the book as a whole? Why is it significant that the chapters and their titles reference the cycles of the moon, the passage of time, and the changing of the seasons? What do these items say about change as an inherent part of our human experience? What can we draw from her son’s observation in
chapter 4
that Einstein believes the concept of time to be a fiction?
7. Evaluate the genre of the book and its tone. How does the tone of the book influence our reaction as readers? Is the book honest? Convincing? Exaggerated or embellished? Consider the voice of the book—is it sentimental, humorous, serious, or meditative? How does Link employ humor as a literary device? How is her memoir like or unlike other memoirs you have read?
8. Link often relates her story to a greater history. In the first chapter she compares the plight of her family to those who endured the American frontier, “even the Dust Bowl” (
this page
). She creates a sense of multiple generations not only with her own family through her children and her parents but through the sense of history via the long ownership of the farm and history of the land over so many years. What are some of the common struggles featured in Link’s memoir? Why do you believe the documentation of these kinds of experiences in nonfiction, fiction, and poetry is important?
9. How do faith and spirituality surface as key aspects of the book? Link seems to be on a journey to discover her faith and come to an understanding of what she does and does not believe. Raised as a Lutheran, she brings her sons from church to church. She prays, consults the Book of Job, and employs Buddhist practices, mantras, and meditation. Where does she end up in this spiritual journey by the book’s end? In what does she ultimately find faith, a sense of spirituality, and consolation?
10. Is there a traditional villain (or villains) in this book? If so, who are they? What characteristics do they share? Why, for instance, is Link so unfriendly to the potential buyer in
chapter 12
? Besides people, what other items or concepts represented in the book become symbols of villainy?
11. Evaluate point of view in the book. Though the story is told by Link, how do her sons and other characters provide some variety in point of view? What is the effect of this? Why is it important that Link’s voice does not overrun the book? In
chapter 5
, for example, as she and her sons gather firewood on the side of the road, she imagines the scene as a bystander would witness it. Why is it important or relevant that she possesse this ability to see things from another perspective?
12. Link says that if there was a single mantra in her childhood, it was “accountability.” What does she mean by this? Does Link ever ask for help or assistance? Why or why not?
13. What dialogue does the book offer about common experience? Does Link, for instance, compare her plight to others, or does she believe it to be her own personal tragedy? How does she link to the thoughts and experiences of others over time throughout the book? Even to the animals found in nature? How would her experiences perhaps have been different if she were facing her problems alone and not living in a pack, as she might call it, with three sons? Alternatively, what is her reaction to her realization of the distinction between her life and that of her parents?
14. There are many symbols throughout the book, but does Link find or create meaning in what she sees around her? What does she mean in
chapter 9
when she says that “you’d better just go on and grab some meaning wherever you can find it” (
this page
)? What examples of irony are present in the book? Do these examples comment on fate or coincidence?
15. How does Link change from the start of the story to its conclusion? How do we find her in the first chapter? Why doesn’t she choose to present herself—especially at the start as readers as just meeting her—in a better light? Was this presentation of herself a good or faulty tactic? Explain.
16. Though Link’s book is a work of nonfiction, she is not unlike many characters in world literature. How does Link’s character compare to other protagonists or heroines in literature? What do they share in common? What sets her apart? Consider her role as wife, mother, farmer, woman, head of household, etc.
27. At the conclusion of the book, what is it that Link sees as her greatest victory? Do you agree?
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