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Date Posted: 14:07:29 04/07/11 Thu
Author: Adelina Axelrod
Author Host/IP: 128.148.43.18
Subject: This Life is in Your Hands." by Melissa Colman

Dear friends,


Melissa Coleman was born in 1969 to parents who were hippie pioneers. In 1968 they had moved to Cape Rosier, Me., to start an organic farm and devote every waking hour to its upkeep. They had gone there as protégés of Helen and Scott Nearing, whose books, most notably “Living the Good Life,” inspired a back-to-the-land movement predicated on hard work and strict discipline. Their goals reflected Thoreau’s determination “to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.”
Enlarge This Image

From the book "This Life is in Your Hands."

Melissa Coleman with her parents, Eliot and Sue Coleman, in 1972.

THIS LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS

One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone

By Melissa Coleman

Illustrated. 325 pages. HarperCollins. $25.99.
Enlarge This Image
Alan J. Boutot

Melissa Coleman

“Why does he have to be so self-righteous?” Ms. Coleman’s paternal aunt once asked about her idealistic brother.

Here is how Ms. Coleman writes in her memoir, “This Life Is in Your Hands,” about her earliest years: “What a joy it is to be alive, Mama thought, to have a handsome husband and a laughing young child.” And here is what anyone drawn in by the unlikely magnetism of Ms. Coleman’s vegetable-filled, sun-kissed story will ask: O.K., what went wrong?

Even if “This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone” did not have a subtitle that refers to a damaged family, the expectation of trouble in paradise would be inevitable. “The very nature of paradise,” clucks one schadenfreude-filled person quoted in the book, “is that it will be lost.” But the Colemans did not face an ordinary set of domestic problems, and that’s a big part of this book’s intense readability. Ms. Coleman, a freelance writer, overworks the foreshadowing and omen-dropping, but she manages to weave a lot of real suspense into the question of what type of destruction is in the offing.

There are a lot of options. Ms. Coleman’s mother, Sue, always called Mama here, does a lot of laughing and smiling in the early stages of the story. But she also does a backbreaking amount of physical work, and it takes its toll. Mama has mood swings. She writes worrisome things in her diary. She takes too much refuge in fasting, but this is the rare memoir in which nobody is seriously addicted to anything and nobody gets abused. It is not another cookie-cutter coming-of-age book.

There will be readers who approach Ms. Coleman’s book already knowing a good deal about her illustrious father, Eliot, who became widely celebrated in the world of organic farming. But as a young father, Ms. Coleman says, he had a defensive and aloof side. “How many son of a guns are this lucky?” he liked to ask, as he aggressively rebelled against the visions of success that his parents, Social Register figures called Skates and Skipper (whose nickname for Eliot was Bootsie), tried to inculcate. Ms. Coleman had a maternal relation who arrived on the Mayflower, while her father’s relatively late-coming family traced its New World roots back to only 1635. The book’s cast of characters also includes Heidi, Ms. Coleman’s younger sister. She is described as a baby-talking time bomb. “When Heidi walks through the garden, it’s as if she never touches a thing with her feet,” a family friend observes, delivering one of many hints of peril that the Colemans face. Another is celebrity. Though they are unknown and totally self-sufficient in Ms. Coleman’s early memories, their enterprise (and the next-door Nearings’) began to attract acolytes. Pretty, nymphlike blond acolytes who liked to do their farm work in the nude. “Pants dance” was their merry name for having to throw on clothes when strangers came by.

Along came The Wall Street Journal, with a 1971 front-page feature that made the lean, handsome Colemans look like figures from a Walker Evans photo and included this: “When Sue and Eliot Coleman sit down to eat in their tiny one-room house, they use tree stumps instead of chairs.” As a prep-school friend of Ms. Coleman’s father put it: “Well, I’ll be damned. Eliot’s gone and put his finger on the zeitgeist.”

But the zeitgeist wasn’t enough. And neither was even the most impeccable organic farming. There were health problems that a vegetarian diet could not prevent. There was hyperactivity in one parent, depression in the other. There was a total lack of religious faith, at least according to Ms. Coleman, who had no notion of a higher power even when she desperately needed one. And the revered Nearings, who advocated dividing the day into sections for head, hands and heart, were a shocking disappointment when anything deeper was needed. “The Nearings didn’t know how to solve the troubles next door,” Ms. Coleman writes damningly, “and preferring to steer clear of the vagaries of emotion, they let us be.”

“This Life Is in Your Hands” takes some of its title from Helen Nearing’s effort to predict the future by reading the hand lines of Ms. Coleman’s sister. The lines of the hand can grow and change, she told that little girl. “I didn’t fully understand what she meant then, but I do now,” writes Ms. Coleman, who has re-imagined her early years with such intensity that there are times when this book turns overripe, and the plink-plink of every freshly picked berry dropped in a bucket can almost be heard. More often, there is haunting power here, as well as lush, vivid atmosphere that is alluring in its own right.

And there is a cautionary tale about what can happen to even the best-laid plans. Ms. Coleman keeps that story so nuanced that it would be a disservice to reveal what was in store. If you want to know what happened, read it for yourself.
A version of this review appeared in print on April 7, 2011, on page C6 of the New York edition.

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