Synopses & Reviews
In a moving and bittersweet story, M.J. Andersen chronicles her childhood and adolescence in South Dakota, her departure to forge her own life, and her persistent longing for the landscape she left behind. Her hometown, given the fictional name of Plainville, is so quiet that one local family regularly parks by the tracks to watch the train pass through. Yet small-town life and, especially, the prairie prove to be fertile ground for Andersen's imagination. Exploring subjects as seemingly unrelated as Roy Rogers and Tolstoy's beloved Anna Karenina, she repeatedly locates a transcendent connection with South Dakota's broad horizon.
Andersen introduces us to her hardworking newspaper family, which produces one of Plainville's two competing weeklies; to Job's Daughters, a Christian association intended to prepare young women for adversity (Plainville's chapter assumes the added responsibility of throwing the town's best teen dances); and even to a local variety of hardy alfalfa, to which her best friend has a surprising kinship.
Leaving behind her physical home, Andersen travels East for college, remaining to begin a journalism career. With her husband she eventually settles into her first house, a beautiful Victorian that, though loved, somehow does not feel like home in the way she had anticipated. Through subsequent travels, memories, and a meditation on Tolstoy's complex relationship to his ancestral home, she arrives at a new idea of what home is -- one that should resonate with every American who has ever had to pull up stakes.
Review
"When you come to the end of [
Portable Prairie], you'll feel that you grew up here on the prairie. Or if you did grow up here, you'll get teary-eyed, as I did. I bow to this young writer and kiss her hand. Bravo. Tolstoy would be proud."
- Garrison Keillor
"MJ Andersen's memoir brings to life a kind of small-town America that is our national dream, even as it meditates on the endless disavowing of home that is our national lot. Spare, witty, poignant, brave and never sentimental, it's a book you can dive into and find yourself."
- Elizabeth Kendall, author of American Daughter and The Runaway Bride
"Portable Prairie is an uncommon memoir, a luminous account of one woman's intellectual flowering in the Plains States and beyond, and a deeply moving and intelligent meditation on the essential human experience of home. Andersen writes about places, people, objects, and ideas and reveals how hopelessly and beautifully they are bound together. This is not a confessional book, and those details she selects (and what a treasure they are) are precisely the sort which stimulate in us our own poignant recollections. This is the sort of book one presses on friends and interesting strangers. This is the American story made fresh."
- Jincy Willett, author of Winner of the National Book Award
"M.J. Andersen's memoir, Portable Prairie, unfurls in a finished tone-straightforward, uncluttered, headlong, with a wry smile-in its contemplation on the meaning of "home" worthy of Bachelard. The identifying trait of this memoir among others is its ability to lift you into a sudden dimensional moment-where was I? you wonder-then set you back inside the pacing of its gentle, assured voice. Andersen is a visionary of the lives lived in the realm we too often self-confidently call home. Andersen causes us to readjust our focus, as Willa Cather and Wright Morris do."
- Larry Woiwode, author of What I Think I Did
About the Author
M.J. Andersen grew up in South Dakota and now lives in Massachusetts with her husband. She is a graduate of Princeton University and holds a master's degree from Brown University. A recent fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, she writes for the editorial pages of the
Providence Journal.
Reading Group Guide
1. The author's quest for home revolves around her childhood landscape. How important is landscape to a sense of home?
2. What is the significance of the stained glass window? Why does the author resist installing it in her new home?
3. By taking on the harsh conditions in the Dakotas, the agriculturalist Niels Hansen helped shape the region's identity. How much does the author's sense of self derive from this identity? In what other ways do Americans define themselves?
4. Throughout the book, horses are emblems of imaginative power. What does it mean when the author thinks she can no longer hear her toy horses whinnying from their shoebox? Does anything take their place later on?
5. A trip to California plunges the author's family into a watershed historical moment, the Watts riots of 1965. Do children generally dwell outside history? How and when does the author's historical consciousness dawn?
6. In Denmark, the author feels a sense of belonging. Yet she is wary of identifying too strongly with the group. Why?
7. Plainville gives the author a sense of community that eludes her in Eastboro. Are newcomers to a community destined to remain outsiders?
8. Roy Rogers is among the book's important male characters. How do the male personalities compare with its female personalities? How does sexual identity affect the author's feelings of being at home in the world?
9. Tolstoy's search for meaning becomes intensely bound up in Christianity. How does the author's quest diverge from his? What part does belief play in her idea of home?
10. How has the author's idea of home changed by the end of the book?