DAYTON, Ohio — When Erin McGraw was growing up in Southern California, her parents told her stories about her paternal grandmother. These stories were so amazing to McGraw that she was inspired to write an historical novel based upon her grandmother's life.
The resulting book, "The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard," distills the essence of what McGraw learned about that side of her family and weaves it seamlessly into this fictional narrative about the Los Angeles of a century ago.
"Seamstress" is the fictional story of Nell Plat. It begins in a new century. The year is 1901, Nell lives in rural Kansas with her husband and her in-laws in a sod house. At 17 years of age, Nell is already the mother of one baby and another one is on the way. She's very unhappy.
It was a hard life out on the prairie. They were just barely getting by. Nell was a terrible cook. The only talent that she seemed to possess was her ability to sew. She loved to make dresses for her daughter. She began to earn some money by making clothes for women in the nearby town.
She had a dream of one day going to California. She secretly saved up her money to buy a train ticket to Los Angeles. Shortly after the birth of her second child, Nell deserted her family and moved away without telling anybody where she was going.
This is exactly what McGraw's grandmother did in 1901. Her family history gets sketchy after that so McGraw, a professor of creative writing at Ohio State University, imagined what might have happened next for her fictional narrator, Nell.
Nell moves to Los Angeles, where the film industry is just beginning to take root in sunny Hollywood. She works hard, saving her pennies as she builds a career for herself as a seamstress to affluent women who value her skills at re-creating the latest French designs.
She re-creates herself, never looking back. California was a magnet for small-town girls from the Midwest who dreamed of becoming movie stars. McGraw's account of the burgeoning film industry during this period as America passed through WWI and into the Jazz Age of the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition is superbly told.
Nell becomes a seamstress for the movie studios. She marries a lovely man and starts a new family. Her daughter Mary is the perfect child. Her past life is nearly forgotten. Her husband knows nothing about the two daughters abandoned 20 years before.
One day the doorbell rings. Two women are on the doorstep. Nell doesn't recognize them. Yet they look strangely familiar. This really happened to McGraw's grandmother. Truth can be stranger than fiction. We cannot run away from our past no matter how hard we try.
So we try again. "This time, we say, this time we will make selves that are shining."
McGraw took kernels of truth and whipped them into one heck of a novel.
Book reviewer Vick Mickunas blogs daily about books at www.DaytonDailyNews.com/booknook. Contact him at vick AT vickmickunas.com