Gropper quotes another woman who came back to her saying: "I
didn't know it was going to be so racy!"
Racy? What are we talking about here, French postcards?
Well, before you ask Gropper if everything in the book is true, she
will remind you of her disclaimer right there on the cover:
"Fictionalized Memoirs."
"Now wouldn't it spoil the fun if I said which parts are
fictionalized?" she asks.
When her granddaughters began e-mailing her with questions about their
own careers and relationships, it was the 1990s and Gropper and her
husband, Barney Feldman, had retired to Palm Beach County.
She continued to teach creative writing at the Center for Lifetime
Learning at Palm Beach Community College where she later served three
years as president and still remains active, when it occurred to her that
her answers brought back so many of her own life changes. Here, then, was
a framework for memoirs.
"I wanted to write about my life for my progeny," Gropper
said. "Here was a perfect platform to present my own story."
Or at least a story that mirrors her own life and career.
Names are changed. A gauze of fiction keeps the reader guessing, but
not much. Gropper's narrative is compelling because it reads like the best
fiction, and can even be a bit unsettling — to the male reader. More
than once I thought: "If she's telling the truth, women are a lot
more like men than they let on and they owe us a big apology."
Among Gropper's observations:
"You lose a piece of yourself in a relationship... You leave
behind more than an imprint in a mattress."
"A woman learns that there is a price to pay for freedom."
"You can be self-centered without being selfish."
The author, like her namesake "Martha" in the book, grew up
in a home with a devoted father and a neurotic mother who was convinced
Nazis were going to drag her back to Vienna and that women were scheming
to steal her husband. Each night, Gropper recalled, her father, a New York
tailor, came home exhausted from work to fall asleep in his chair, deaf to
his wife's crazed accusations. Her mother needn't have worried.
"A man who is unfaithful and wants to hide it," she wrote
from an adult perspective, "comes home with a covering
exuberance."
Written from the third-person, we follow the life of a woman who
survives the Depression, then attends college a short while before
marrying a man who returns wounded from the war.
She re-enrolls in college after her three children are in school and
earns degrees that lead to jobs in journalism, high school counseling and
teaching. While in college she is befriended by a professor-mentor who
remains in her life for years.
In the course of writing assignments for New York magazines, Martha
begins a tempestuous relationship with a married New York editor, somehow
managing a discretion in all her extracurricular friendships that never
seems to affect a loving and "completely satisfying" love affair
with her husband and father of her children.
After her husband dies, Martha breaks off the relationship with the
married editor when he offers to divorce and marry her. "I reminded
him that never once did I tell him that I loved him." During a period
of recovery from her losses, she finds solace and intimacy with Lydia, a
longtime friend and confidant.
In Not Far from the Tree, there are lessons, confessions,
intimacies so rarely shared with a reader that it is easy to find yourself
thinking, "Wow! This gal is trusting me with some really personal
stuff here."
Then you remember: Esther C. Gropper — journalist, educator, mother,
grandmother, wife, lover, sampler of many dishes spread on life's buffet
— is trusting everybody with her story.
Not Far from the Tree, $16.95, (Authorhouse) is available on
amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com; call (561) 649-0136; or e-mail
gropperes@aol.com