Laura, My Old Friend, Comes to Visit

When I learned they were publishing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography, I anticipated its arrival like a little girl waiting for Christmas morning. I couldn’t wait to read about my life-long literary heroine and friend in her own, true words.

I ordered Pioneer Girl in August, three months before its release date. It seemed like November would never come. I checked my order online frequently to see if there was a shipping date scheduled. Then the day came at last. I wasn’t the only one eager to reunite with Laura, Mary, Ma and Pa. On its release day, my copy was immediately back ordered, the first 15,000 copies already spoken for.

Weeks went by. The publisher ordered a second printing of 15,000. It was due in January, but those were sold out before they even came off the press. Would I have to wait for the third printing in March? Then last Tuesday I arrived home to find the most wonderful, heavy, rectangular package waiting on my porch!

I tore the box open, clapped my hands, jumped up and down and hugged the book close. It was like seeing a long-time friend who lives on the other side of the country for the first time in twenty years. When I opened the book and the spine cracked with newness, I even became a little misty-eyed.

Pioneer Girl is a big, academic book. It looks like a college textbook. It contains Laura’s original manuscript, written for an adult audience and never published. In it is the true account of stories left out, events she re-ordered and the actual people fictionalized characters like Nellie Olson were based on in her children’s books.

The editors of Pioneer Girl painstakingly researched facts and people in the manuscript and included heavy annotation that’s as long as Wilder’s own words. I love history as much as I love Laura, another gift reading The Little House Series at a young age gave me. The editor’s notes are fascinating, because they add facts that put Laura’s life in context with the history of the American west, its settlers and politics.

There is also something I wasn’t expecting and perhaps the best part about Pioneer Girl. It’s not just the tale of Laura’s life growing up on the prairie. The editors also included all they could find about Laura’s writing process: why she wrote her story, how her skill as an author evolved, how the manuscript became a published children’s series and her collaboration with her daughter Rose, also a writer. This intimate look into her life as an author in such detail is as fascinating as the rest of her life.

I wanted to be a writer since I was nine because of Laura, but I’ve struggled to call myself a writer, feeling unworthy and unaccomplished. Then I began to read Pioneer Girl.

Laura was just a prairie girl who lived as a nomad, wandering from Wisconsin to South Dakota to finally Missouri. It wasn’t until the age of 62 that she set out to write Pioneer Girl. Her career as a world-famous author didn’t begin until three years later when Little House in the Big Woods was published. She could not have known when she wrote those stories about the happy little family in the happy little cabin how she would capture the hearts of generations again and again, inspiring devotion usually reserved for rock stars and movie legends.

Laura reminded me how much I love to write, why I want to write and renewed belief in myself as a writer. Once again, I find myself inspired by Laura and her pioneering spirit.

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