waiting room – Miz Meliz

I am Great

February 16, 2012October 21, 2012 MizMeliz

I was standing in a waiting room of a doctor’s office with my parents and my three little boys. My mom was seeing the doctor. My dad and I were entertaining the kids. It had been about an hour when my mom finally came out. As we stood at the counter waiting to make another appointment, I saw this posted to the wall in the receptionist’s workspace. It was an 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of paper that read, “I Am Great” and I read it out loud to my kids and my father. When the clerk came to her desk I said, “I love that. I really needed to read that today!” She said she wrote it when her kids were small. Then she did a remarkable thing. She took it off the wall and gave it to me. Thank you Ms. Elizabeth! Where ever you are!

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...

View all my reviews

%d bloggers like this:

Grow the Community

Like this: