Were you a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan, growing up?

I had a friend who grew up in an affluent suburb on Long Island. Her grandparents had escaped the holocaust. And yet she sat down every week the TV, in a sunbonnet, to watch Little House on the Prairie. While I was never a fan of the series – it took Laura’s world and populated it with 1970s drama of the week plots – I was a fan of the books. I have written before – and will probably write again with no apologies – about reading “the Little House books” when I was growing up. I have the entire series and read them at least annually. Even now I watch the marketplace like a hawk and snap up the latest biography or repackaged coffee table book with collections of Laura’s letters and early drafts of the books. I even own the cookbook. (It lives on the bookshelf though, not the cookbook shelf.)

In The Wilder Life, McClure – who was living in Brooklyn and working as a Children’s book editor at the time – goes on the ultimate LIW road trip: she retraces the family’s peripatetic migration through the Midwestern states. Along the way – and accompanied by wry comments from her boyfriend, who represents the non-Laura-obsessed reader of her book, a Watson for her Sherlock – McClure bakes recipes from the books: she makes candy by drizzling molasses on snow; buys a butter churn and makes her own butter (so Brooklyn); she considers baking vanity cakes – described so glowingly by Laura as a special birthday treat that impresses the other little girls at a birthday party – until McClure realizes that they are mostly lard.

And then McClure sets out on an epic road trip – or series of road trips – a pilgrimage to visit all of the places that Laura lived. She drives to Pepin (the town near the Big Woods where Laura’s pocket rips, which is what McClure also remembers about Pepin in her book) to visit the little house where they lived in the big woods (a replica, I believe). And then to all the other places where Laura lived. My favorite scene – and the one that has stayed with me since I first read The Wilder Life is the one where she and her boyfriend spend the night in a fiberglass covered wagon in a campground out on the prairie in the midst of a thunderstorm. Her delight turns to fear as the winds pick up, the thunder booms, and lightening illuminates their tiny prairie schooner. I want to go on this epic roadtrip; I want to sleep in a fake covered wagon on the prairie during a thunderstorm. I want my husband to humor me the way her boyfriend humors her.

The whole time I was reading this book, I was thinking to myself how wonderful it was to find someone else as obsessed as – and, to be honest, even a little more obsessed with – these books as I am. In fact, I wouldn’t call my feeling about them an obsession. Really more of a passionate interest. Reading McClure’s reflections on why these books appeal to her made me wonder what it was that made them appeal to me. Is it the same thing that makes children demand story after story about what life was like when we were their age? Is it Laura’s writing style: that speaking in pictures that she had to develop to describe the world so vividly that Mary could see it in her mind? Was it that a little girl could travel around with her family and have real adventures, coming face to face with wolves and bears, almost getting lost in snowstorms, saving her sisters when fireballs came down the chimney, or living through the wars between the white settlers and the native Americans whose land the settlers were taking? I mean, I love Ramona Quimby – more on that some other day – but she was not having adventures like these!

For me, there was a sense of familiarity: Laura’s family moved a lot; my family moved a lot. Laura’s mother made her clothes and Laura didn’t have money for things she wanted; my mother made my clothes – for a number of years – and didn’t have money for things I wanted. Laura fought with beautiful blonde-haired Mary and got spanked for it; I fought with my beautiful blonde-haired sister and got spanked for it.

The love of Laura Ingalls Wilder somehow became a generational thing: I read them, my little sisters (only 3 and 5 years younger than me) didn’t. When my nieces and friend’s daughters were little, I tried gifting them to the next generation without success: one girl got as far as the pig-butchering scene in the first book and wouldn’t let her mother read further; others just weren’t interested. When I first started bookselling, boxed sets of LIW arrived in droves in September and October, were stacked up in the Children’s area near the Christmas display, and sold out in early December – when I left many years later, this was no longer a thing.

What happened? Was it a question of replacing Laura Ingalls Wilder – which feels honest – with American Girl Dolls – which feel, to me at least, fake? Did the TV show tarnish the memory?

Who knows. But, if I owned this book on paper instead of e-, it would be right there on the shelf next to the faded yellow covers with red letters, as the next thing to read each year after West From Home.

Did you read LIW growing up? Are there any girls still reading them?