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Occasions of Sin
by Sandra Scofield
W. W. Norton, 2004, 256 pages
Novelist Sandra Scofield turns to memoir in Occasions of Sin, a work that stands tall among the many personal narratives on display in bookstores today. Like many family stories (Scofield’s taking place mainly in Texas in the 1950s), this one reveals that much of our collective nostalgia is based in wishful memories. Tolstoy famously asserted that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But most families, like Scofield’s family of origin, exist on a sliding scale of happiness and unhappiness in which the details behind the emotional status at any given time are as varied as can be, and long-term survival is a function of the gifts of time and human resilience to heal, or cover up, or deny, or at least learn to live with, our wounds. Four decades have passed since the events Scofield compellingly narrates, but the reader who appreciates the instructive quality of witnessing the way another person “exorcises” the past will find Occasions of Sin to be a cathartic and rewarding experience.
Scofield was sixteen years old in 1959 when her mother, Edith, died, and she begins her story by revealing this fact. As unexpected as Edith’s death was to her family, it is the reader’s focal point from page one on as we follow the many problematic relationships within this family. Edith herself could be described as somewhat enigmatic, evidenced in many ways but perhaps chiefly in her choice to convert to Catholicism: “Becoming Catholic was one of Mother’s notions. A ‘notion’ set her apart from her hard-working kin; it was an impulse that sprang from eccentricity, a torque in her self-perception. . . . She had an imagination, she read novels and poetry. It was a short leap to religion.”
Catholicism provides a sort of anchor for Edith, and, by extension, for Sandra, who attends Catholic boarding schools for several years and faces the challenges of coming of age in that context without a stable motherly presence. Edith and Sandra share, too, an affinity for some of Catholicism’s unique offerings:
Being Catholic added a whole new slate of activities. Mother and I went to Rosary on Wednesday nights. We went to breakfast in the church hall after Sunday Mass, and got to know other families. We wore little woolen squares on strings around our neck, called scapulars, and bought hats for Sunday Mass. What I liked best about our new, improved life, though, was private: Mother and I praying together in our room before bed.
But Edith is beset by troubled relationships with her mother and husband, and by a chronic illness of the sort that might have been characterized at the time as a “weak constitution.” Scofield chronicles their collective travails and her own struggles in strong prose that sets the west Texas stage and unfolds the variety of personalities, in addition to Edith, who influenced her during her growing-up years -- her grandmother, father, sister, and aunts and uncles, the priests and nuns who populate the Catholic aspect of her world, as well as schoolmates and boyfriends.
Scofield’s personal story develops the quality of a universal story as the author strives to rediscover the mother she loved deeply but who was lost to her far too early to be understood as deeply as she was loved. She writes as a participant in her own life, not as a victim of other people’s choices, actions, and mistakes, thus drawing not sympathy but empathy from the reader. By revealing early that Edith will die young, the narrative has a quality of inevitability as young Sandra strides inexorably toward a life-altering event that will prove to be not merely an end but a beginning of new and ongoing discoveries about herself, her origins, and the woman she will become.
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