#It hurts my head trying to figure out what they are taking artistic licence with lol

[zhoudadudugongjin]

I see we're messing with timelines again, since Dong Cheng died in 200AD, at which point Sima Yi's wife was *checks notes* 11 years old lmao. Yet in this show they're already married with multiple kids.

[darklingichor]

I listened to Maude by Donna Foley Mabry

If anyone stumbling across this wants to read this book, bail now ‘cause I'mma going to spoil the fuck out of it.

First, here’s what it is about. The author’s grandmother use to tell her stories about her life. It wasn’t an easy life and it was pretty eventful starting before the turn of the last century through two world wars and The Depression. The book is a life story with the story of history as a backdrop. It sounded like my kind of story. It turned out very depressing but not every story has a happy ending so that didn’t bother me. The style was simple but it fit the no nonsense character of Maude who tells the story. I liked it.

In a nutshell, Nola Maude Clayborn is born 1892 in a small town in Tennessee. When she was seven, her parents die in a house fire. Maude is with her pregnant older sister Helen and her husband when their parents’ house burns down so she lives. The shock seems to send Helen into early labor and her son is stillborn. Maude moves in with her sister and brother-in-law and keeps the house while her sister recovers. A couple of years go by and Helen gets pregnant again. This time the baby, a girl, lives. Soon the house becomes too small for everyone and 14 year old Maude marries James Connor, an 18 year old boy that was courting her. They move into a small cabin on his parents’ property. Maude is happy with James and she soon becomes pregnant and has a little girl they name Lulu. James is trying to break into professional baseball and when Maude is 16 the whole family goes to watch him play a game between their town’s team and another town’s team. A scout is going to be there so James is hopeful. He gets hit with a hard pitch in the head and dies.

James’ father dies not long after and that leaves his mother, Maude and Lulu. Maude doesn’t want to marry again as she can’t imagine loving another man. She helps her mother-in-law by sewing and doing laundry. She’s a talented seamstress so her services do bring in a little money.

Years pass and Lulu is ten and Maude is 26 when a friend’s brother (named George) comes to town and starts calling on Maude. He’s nice enough and takes her on a buggy ride but she’s not interested.

The problem with that buggy ride was that they were unchaperoned - a big deal in the early 1900’s and although nothing happened on that ride, she has to marry him or be shunned by the whole town.

So George’s sister bullies him into proposing, they are married and she and Lulu pack up and move to Missouri to live with his evil mother.

Seriously she’s evil. She hates Maude on sight and doesn’t hide it. George has a spine the consistency of melting Jell-O and is lazy to boot so he’s no help. When Maude gets pregnant George’s mother changes her tune toward her but only until the baby is born. Literally the minute Maude’s son is born, the old bat takes him without letting Maude hold him and leaves Maude (who is bleeding) the to just lie there. Lulu comes to check on her and Maude sends her to get their neighbor, a friend named Clara. Clara feeds her and cleans her up. The first time Maude holds her son - whom she will discover later George’s mother already named William - is when she needs to feed him. Not surprising considering the trauma of the experience and the hours it took for Maude to even touch her son, she doesn’t feel that bonded to him. She keeps the name William but adds James as his middle name hoping to foster a connection. George’s mother pretty much takes over William’s (who Lulu and Maude call Bud) care. Then once Bud can eat on his own she pushes Maude down the stairs and tells her in pretty plain language that she wants her dead and won’t stop till she is gone. George won’t do anything and just tells Maude to be careful. It was already established that George’s mother likely killed George’s father.

Luckily, the Spanish Flu epidemic comes through town and kills off the old woman. Unfortunately it also kills Lulu. She went to bed fine but was dead in the morning. From here I can get more general although the story is still interesting but this is going to be super long as it is.

Maude sinks into a depression but recovers after a few months. She doesn’t have to worry about being killed but George is still lazy as fuck and it is frustrating for her. She ends up having more kids. First Gene then Betty Sue, She bonds with these two but when she gets pregnant again she isn’t happy and is really resenting George. Paul’s birth is hard and she doesn’t bond with him.

Years go on. Bud joins the army Gene starts working with a forestry program. The Depression hits, George loses his job and the last four in the house have to move to Detroit to live with George’s sister and her husband.

George gets a job and his sister threatens him into keeping it. They are able to rent a house next door.

It comes to light that Paul probably has a learning disability but George won’t allow anyone to help him. Maude always refers to Paul as being “Not right”. As do many other people

Gene gets hurt on the job and has to move home. Years pass.

Betty Sue gets married to a drunk

Her husband and Paul become drinking buddies

Bud is killed when he falls off of an army truck

Betty Sue is killed by hit and run driver.

Maude catches George cheating and divorces him

Gene marries a pregnant woman ( the author’s mother) who hates Maude. Gene raises the baby as his own even after he and her mother split up. Maude helps raise her and treats her as she would treat any grandchild.

Maude marries again at some point. Gene dies, I don’t remember how.

One day Paul asks Maude for money, she refuses he steals all of the money she had saved away and some keepsakes she had managed to keep. Maude dies the next day. Depressing but compelling.

Now, a weird habit of mine is that when I become interested in something I tend to find every scrap of information I can. I did this after I finished “Maude”.

The author does say that parts of the story are fictionlized but much of it was based off of the stories she was told. After my research I think that this was classified as “non-fiction” by the same person who keeps putting “Memoirs of a Geisha” in the non-fiction section of Goodwill.

Now, first off, I don’t really have sophisticated research sites at my disposal and just plain Google can be wrong so if someone has resources that are better than mine, then by all means correct me as the following is not meant to show ANY disrespect to Maude or her life. It is simply my view on how the book was written and how the book and the research made me feel. Cites listed at the bottom.

What I could find:

Maude’s first husband James died of consumption and not head trauma caused by a baseball. Also James Connor is actually listed as being David Walker Warren. Their daughter is listed as Lula Helen Warren and she died of “pernicious malaria” not the Spanish Flu. I can sort of understand these changes as records are sometimes wrong, and it does seem like the site is a little like a memorial Wikipedia, but it does have a lot of detail. The author herself said she didn’t remember all of the names that her grandmother told her. As for James’ death, artistic license is understandable.

What pushed me over the edge was all of these little things and Paul, her youngest son.

He is listed in a 1940 census along with Maude, George and the rest of their children but other than that he just seems to disappear. He’s not even listed among her children on the one site I could find about her grave. Considering that, after considerable foreshadowing, he becomes the villan of the book, I wonder how fictionlized he is.

That and the other errors sort of made me doubt how much I liked this book.

I find it hard to believe that the author could have gotten the name of the first husband wrong considering that James/David seems to have been the love of Maude’s life.

While dramatic licence could explain the cause of death discrepancy it makes me wonder why. Consumption is a dramatic enough death, why brain him with a baseball?

The differences in Lulu’s cause of death could have been a mistake on someone’s part or some cultural thing that I am not aware of but it is odd.

However, all of this and then Paul being such a hazy figure and also being the bad guy on a story that really didn’t need one (I mean a woman who buried a husband and four of her five children, sad. A woman who had to do this and be forced into a loveless second marriage with a lay about and living through The Depression? Tragic! No need to have a bad guy) makes me think that if Paul was a jackass, the author made him worse to punch up the story and to tie the bow.

Then I started thinking that the same can be said for all the other changes.

She changed the cause of James/David’s death so that the game he loved so much killed him.

She changed his name so that Maude could try to foster a bond between herself and her second child - William James. She couldn’t very well use that plot element when Bud’s birth name doesn’t include “David”.

It makes much more of a dramatic statement for Lulu to be taken by an epidemic sweeping through the country. She also dies suddenly like her father. One minute healthy, the next, gone. One moment happy, the next, lost. Just like the contented life Maude had before being made to marry George.

Neat little plot bows, neat little symbolic bows. Too neat.

If these were the stories that Maude told the author then, okay. But it seems much more likely that Donna Foley took a compelling story and fictionalized it to the point of melodrama. To me, this made the story lose power. I would have respected the author more if she’s taken fewer liberities. The whole Paul plot could be spot on, it was just foreshadowed so early it caused me to speculate. It also seems a little tasteless to change names and causes of death just to make a “better” story especially when the author was writing about her own family. Sources https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=140670720 https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=175465012 http://www.archives.com/1940-census/maude-foley-mi-122700316