In pleasant contrast to the recent flood of haunting childhood memoirs, A Girl's Life is about growing up in a functional family, about nurture, serenity, wonderment, and the stabilizing contributions an unencumbered heart makes in the life of an observant child. Marianne Gingher makes the events of a normal girlhood not only engaging but distinctly illuminating and explores rites of passage that are as persuasive in shaping an artist's sensibilities as are privations. A meditation on the comforts of home place and family, A Girl's Life celebrates the last era in America, the 1950s and 1960s, when it was still possible to enjoy a cynicism-free girlhood - when it was still safe for children to take gifts from strangers and not yet unwise for them to leave the doors of their hearts unlocked. As Eudora Welty wrote in her autobiographical memoir One Writer's Beginning, A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within. The seventeen personal narratives collected here corroborate Welry's conviction. Arranged in a loose chronology, the tales document a southern white girl's middle-class initiation into the adult world. The first section, Sanc