Missing Lucile: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew - Hardcover

Berne, Suzanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565126254 ISBN 13: 9781565126251

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2010

Synopsis

Even as a child, Suzanne Berne understood the source of her father’s terrible melancholy: he’d lost his mother when he was a little boy. Decades later, with her father now elderly and ailing, she decides to try to uncover the woman who continues to haunt him.

Every family has a missing person, someone who died young or disappeared, leaving a legacy of loss. Aided by vintage photographs and a box of old keepsakes, Berne sets out to fill in her grandmother’s silhouette and along the way uncovers her own foothold in American history.

Lucile Berne, née Kroger, was a daughter of Bernard Henry Kroger, the archetypal American self-made man, who at twenty-three established what is today’s $76 billion grocery enterprise. From her turn-of-the-century Cincinnati childhood to her college years at Wellesley, her tenure as treasurer of her father’s huge company, her stint as a relief worker in devastated France, her marriage to a professional singer, and the elusive, unhappy wealthy young matron she became, Lucile both illustrates and contradicts her times.

In the process of creating this portrait, Berne discovers the function of family history: “to explain what is essentially inexplicable―how we came to be ourselves.”

About this title

About the Author:

Suzanne Berne is the author of three novels, the first of which, A Crime in the Neighborhood, won great Britain’s Orange Prize. Her most recent novel is The Ghost at the Table. She lives with her family near Boston and teaches at Boston College.

From Booklist:

Berne’s father, John Henry, lost his mother, Lucile, at an early age, an experience that’s haunted him his entire life. Now, as he battles cancer, his daughter wants to help him accomplish something that has eluded him for his 80-plus years: find out who Lucile Kroger really was. The daughter of self-made American grocer Bernard Kroger, Lucile led what many would consider a charmed life, growing up in a sprawling Cincinnati mansion at the turn of the century. Alas, her father was an often difficult man, and when she went to work for him as the Kroger empire’s treasurer, it was a challenging endeavor. Award-winning novelist Berne (The Ghost at the Table, 2006) pores through what turns out to be a rather paltry collection of Kroger family keepsakes in an effort to understand Lucile, from her college years at Wellesley to her stint as a relief worker in post-WWII France. With few facts to go on, the author must reconstruct much of her family history. The effort is laudable, but the end result is only mildly engaging. --Allison Block

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1565126254
• ISBN 13: 9781565126251
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320