friendship. love – Miz Meliz

A Woman Of Independent Means by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book for the first time as a young girl and loved it. I was asked what inspired me to be a writer, and I thought about how I read a book once and never forgot it. I was pleased to love it just as much after reading it again thirty years later.
A Woman of Independent Means is a story told in a series of letters and correspondence over the lifespan of an average, yet brilliant, young American woman. It goes beyond a coming of age novel. Through her letters, we learn how to read Bess’ thoughts and we realize her inspiration and motivation as she navigates through life.
The coolest thing about rediscovering this book now is that there is an updated preface in new edition that Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey wrote in 1998. She was close to my age when her work was first published and she wrote it while raising her two small daughters. She says that “the traditional advice to writers is to ‘write what you know.’ I always amend that to ‘write what you can imagine knowing’.” I feel as though she is speaking directly to me and it is at this moment in my life that I needed to hear these words from the woman who first inspired me to write so long ago.
https://mizmeliz.com/2012/02/27/writin...

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