cover image Fugitive Spring: A Memoir

Fugitive Spring: A Memoir

Deborah Digges. Alfred A. Knopf, $20 (221pp) ISBN 978-0-394-57722-7

As the sixth of 10 children born to Dutch immigrants, poet Digges ( Late in the Millennium ) has had an interesting upbringing, and here she chronicles it with humor and love. Raised on a Missouri apple orchard, she was exposed to realities of life and death early on. Her father was a doctor specializing in cancer, so contact with the terminally ill became an everyday affair. She describes how he involved his children, letting them assist in his experiments with rats and mice. The family was also deeply religious, faithfully adhering to the teachings of the Southern Baptist Church. Adolescence was tumultuous for Digges; she railed against her parents' strictures and flunked out of the Christian college where they sent her. She married a Vietnam fighter pilot and had a child, but kept to her free-spirited ways, moving to California and Texas, and eventually returned to school to complete a graduate degree after her divorce. Evocative, this memoir is filled with childlike wonder at life's simple pleasures. (Jan.)