SEAHORSE MEMOIRS

Meeting Judith, learning about her, is a journey every woman should take. That is why it is both inspiring and a great pleasure to read SEAHORSE MEMOIRS. Women who have already read this small novel compare it to THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY. They say that SEAHORSE MEMOIRS left them with the same sense of poignancy and regret, but at the same time was uplifting. SEAHORSE MEMOIRS straddles the fine line between fiction and memoir. It is indeed a memoir, an account of a memorable life told by a woman named Judith to an accidental condfidante. Whether every word is perfect truth cannot be ascertained. It is too late for that, but even if it were not, Judith's life had a dreamlike quality that arose both from her personality and from the fact that she thought in shadowy, hard to define images that seem to float in a world of her own making. I have tried to retain that quality while telling Judith's story as accurately as I can.Born into a family that denied her all pleasure and conferred more than its share of pain, Judith learned to live in the books she read. Yet when dramatic changes in her life demand that she deal with the reality of her daughter's economic future, she thinks and acts with all the precision of a financial expert, albeit one who knows, or used to know, almost nothing of finance but snippets of information gleaned from her older husband, who manages money for a living. He and his long-time mistress (who improbably becomes Judith's valued friend), love to talk about money. Judith listens and learns. And then, serendipitously, she finds love for the very first time at the age of forty, a love that sends her racing down the beach at night for secret trysts, that encompasses her totally until, improbably again, she becomes pregnant for the first time in her life. Her joy is unbounded then, as is her determination to ensure that her child knows pleasure from the first moment of her life. Judith's story takes place on a beach, a magnificent long beach where mansions now rise beside the small cottages that once were enough for people of wealth. Mist and sea and waves form a constant, ever-moving background that blend with the dream-like quality of Judith's life. You will feel her emotions with her; she can be raw with pain and fear, yet so joyous that she romps in ecstatic circles; she can be bewildered but also practical, full of knowledge she did not know she had, especially when she finds the seahorse. It tells her everything she needs to know. And she can be triumphant, not because she has finally triumphed over others, but quietly, internally triumphant when she reaches the goals she has set for herself. That is the final improbability of her life - that a woman without education, who lived in poverty and pain for most of her life, should triumph so magnificently over circumstances that have so often defeated others. Whether she will be judged a heroine or criminal I do not know or care. For me, her biographer, and for the people who knew her, Judith was a woman who need not be judged at all. Like the seahorse that inspired her, she was neither moral nor immoral, neither right nor wrong. She was only a woman almost obliterated by forces beyond her control who managed to twist her fate to meet her own needs and those of her daughter. I will always remember her story; I hope you will too.