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    Missing Lucile: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew
    Unavailable
    Missing Lucile: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew
    Unavailable
    Missing Lucile: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew
    Ebook342 pages8 hours

    Missing Lucile: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew

    By Suzanne Berne

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    An award-winning author’s reconstruction of her grandmother’s life “takes us deep into the lore of history as well as family” (Sven Birkerts).
     
    Even as a child, Suzanne Berne understood the source of her father’s terrible melancholy: He’d lost his mother when he was a little boy. Decades later, with her dad now elderly and ailing, she decides to try to uncover the woman who continues to haunt him.
     
    Every family has a missing person, someone who died young or disappeared, leaving a legacy of loss. Aided by vintage photographs and a box of old keepsakes, Berne sets out to fill in her grandmother’s silhouette and along the way uncovers her own foothold in American history.
     
    Lucile Berne, née Kroger, was a daughter of Bernard Henry Kroger, the archetypal American self-made man, who at twenty-three established what is today’s $76 billion grocery enterprise. From her turn-of-the-century Cincinnati childhood to her college years at Wellesley, her tenure as treasurer of her father’s huge company, her stint as a relief worker in devastated France, her marriage to a professional singer, and the elusive, unhappy wealthy young matron she became, her granddaughter paints a portrait of a woman and her times, and discovers the function of family history: “to explain what is essentially inexplicable—how we came to be ourselves.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 12, 2010
    ISBN9781616200312
    Unavailable
    Missing Lucile: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew
    Author

    Suzanne Berne

    Suzanne Berne is the author of?four previous novels: The Dogs of Littlefield;?The Ghost at the Table;?A Perfect Arrangement; and?A Crime in the Neighborhood, winner of Great Britain’s Orange Prize. She lives outside of Boston with her husband. 

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    Reviews for Missing Lucile

    4/5

    9 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Often haunting and well written, the author attempts to fill the gaps of her family history by researching what she knows of them. Her conclusions are profound and universal.
    • 5/5
      Novelist and college professor Suzanne Berne goes on a personal quest to tell the story of her grandmother, Lucile Kroger Berne, who died in her early 30s in 1932, when the author’s father was just six years old. He grew up knowing precious little about his mother and late in life wanted to know more. With a few journal pages, a photo or two and a packet of black-and-white negatives, Ms. Berne has little to go on. But she persists and, using her findings and her own lively imagination, tells the tale of a woman born to privilege who died much too young. Missing Lucile is a marvelous book, researched in the best non-fiction traditions, but infused with a novelist’s sensibility and written in the language of literary fiction. The author’s commentaries about the nature of photography and biography are enlightening. I found most fascinating the story of the Wellesley College Reconstruction Unit, a group of alumnae, including Lucile, who traveled to France after World War II to help the people of that devastated country get their lives back. The book is replete with the photos Ms. Berne unearthed, but it would have been helpful if the photo reproduction were better.