“How the Light Gets In”

I am reading How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny – the latest in her Chief Inspector Gamache series.  If you are unfamiliar with this series, I highly recommend it.  The books need to be read in order – the characters and plots are inter-related and, although each book can stand on its own, the stories have oh-so-much-more meaning if read in sequence.  This one is the ninth.

The books are mysteries, set in contemporary times in Quebec.  This one, more than any other, touches on the lives of real people – famous people that I grew up ‘knowing’ about:  The Dionne Quintuplets.  They were born in Canada just two years before I was born and, as far as is known, were the first-ever quintuplets to survive infancy.   During my childhood, ‘The Quints’ were right up there with Shirley Temple in terms of popularity, even though they were Canadian and weren’t even movie stars.

Penny’s book (which I’ve not quite finished) has caused me to reflect upon the exploitation of child celebrities and its ramifications and, beyond that, on what causes some adults to look back upon their lives as disastrous and others to move forward in a positive and productive manner.  The Quints of the book, like the Dionnes, were taken from their family by the government for several years, were put on public display like a carnival act and were credited with bringing in half a billion dollars to Canada – enough to bring the Country out of the Great Depression.   In retrospect, both sets of Quints – the real ones and the ones in Penny’s book – were irrevocably damaged by their “freak show” childhoods and were forever embittered about it.

Shirley Temple

I’ve read similar accounts of Shirley Temple’s childhood, written after the fact, some even after her death.  I’m not so sure I believe those reports.  During the years I attended Stanford, Shirley Temple Black lived in nearby Atherton.  We certainly never traveled in the same circles, mismatched in age and circumstances as we were, but I would see her sometimes out in the community looking like any other well put-together mother of young children.  And, of course, she went on to a fine political career as a representative to the U.N. and later as an ambassador to several different  countries.   Did she see herself as “damaged” or as a once-upon-a-time child “freak?”

I’ve thought about these “life-long damage” reports as I’ve been reading Penny’s book.  Not only the Big News Reports that we see in the paper, but the accounts of people I know who attribute their difficulties as adults to their parents, their teachers or their childhood situations.  And I always wonder what caused their particular penny to drop.  When did they realize that their childhood years were to blame for all the things they were and were not?

The Dionne Quintuplets

Along with that,  I can’t help but think of the many young children and their families that I knew over my four decades as a primary teacher.  What always stood out to me was how resilient kids are and how their youth and inexperience gives them little to measure their own experiences against.  Whatever their lot in life, to most little kids it’s what they know and what they accept as normal.  At what point do people realize that they were “forever damaged?”

But the thing about Penny’s books is that these are the unspoken issues – the big questions she doesn’t state but leads you to think about long after you put the book down.  While you are actually ‘in the story’ you are lost in her marvelous, fictional village of Three Pines with its population of people you’d love to know and, actually, who you do know.  I’m not even finished with this book yet and already I’m looking forward to the next one!