Waiting to Begin: A Memoir - Paperback

by Patricia O'Donnell (Author)

In the opening scene of Waiting to Begin Patricia O'Donnell speaks to incoming students at a university, telling of her transformation from a rebellious young woman to the writer and professor standing before them. Pat feels the story is not wholly true however, that some of the professor was in the younger woman, and that there is "something of that young woman--lawless, braless, rude and exuberant--in me now." Here's the real story, she writes.

I knew the exuberant young woman, as a student in the same MFA writing program Pat attended. She arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts in the middle of a snowy winter, in a beat-up Chrysler with two young kids. I found this inspiring. Pat tells of her parents, who followed her from Iowa, that leaving their promising daughter, a single mother in a motel room, was "not what they had expected."

Pat struggled at first but placed a story in the New Yorker, found love with a fellow student, and went on to establish a creative writing program. Waiting to Begin is a love story in other ways, as Pat revisits her devastated hometown in Iowa, concurrently telling of a heart-wrenching event unfolding in her daughter's life. Pat O'Donnell is a courageous writer just as she was a courageous young woman, writing openly with remarkable sympathy. She remains an inspiration.

--Douglas Whynott, author of The Season of Sugar

Back Jacket

This warm, deep, and fascinating story of an American life spans six decades, from Pat O�Donnell�s childhood in small town Iowa, where her backyard bordered a sea of corn, to her sexual and intellectual coming of age amid the sixties counter-culture of San Francisco, through her struggles as a beginning writer and poverty-stricken single mother with two children trying to earn her MFA, coming to rest in a present life of commitment, maturity, and gratitude, where happiness has landed for her �like a butterfly on a tongue� in her solid marriage, loving relationship with her grown children, and her work as a teacher and writer in Maine. . . . Ultimately, this beautifully crafted book is about the difficulty and joy of circling one�s past, making one�s life into story, and offering it as a written gift to oneself and the rest of the world. For O�Donnell, the act of writing her life brings her to see clearly the "responsibility of owning your life...saying, this life is mine, to do with as I wish, I accept it. I will make it work. Thank you." --Gretchen Legler