This was one of my mother’s favorite books and it lived one her bedside table until I started reading it and didn’t finish it before I left for New York and she encouraged me to take it so I could finish it. It stays in my collection because it reminds me of her. But I only read it once and that was enough.

Originally published in 1920, this book is the diary of Opal Whitley. Born in 1897, when the Pacific Northwest was still wild and rural – more so than today – Opal lived in a logging camp in Oregon with her family. She began writing her diary, the story goes, when she was 3 years old, printing in crayon on sheets of scrap paper scrounged from neighbors. Her writing style was, to put it mildly, odd. She wrote without spaces between her words, inserting line breaks when she ran out of paper, often mid-word, like they tell you to do when encoding things.

Opal rarely called people by their names, giving them nicknames such as “the man with brown neckties who is kind to mice” and referring to animals in precious ways, like “that dear most velvety wood rat.” Even her mother and father were The Mother and The Father. Her friends remembered her as energetic, curious, and always reading and writing, with the ability to tame wild animals. She combined her love of nature with her love of religion and became such a compelling speaker that she was invited to speak to a religious conference in Eugene. Once there, she was so impressive that she was invited to go to college, although she had not graduated high school yet. At college, she would wander out of class to sing to earthworms.

After the death of her mother and grandmother, Opal’s grades deteriorated, and she finished her first year with a number of incompletes, raised money for her second year by giving nature lectures, and then dropped out when her funds ran out, moved to southern California and attempted to get discovered by Hollywood for six months. She then gave nature lectures again and taught children about nature. She also set about trying to self-publish her first book, The Fairyland Around Us, but after she made numerous edits through overthinking it, the publisher destroyed her plates for non-payment, and sent her into a deep depression. Eventually recovering, she managed to raise the money to print enough copies for her subscribers, including Roosevelt (Teddy), Taft, and Mary Roberts Rinehart.

The editor of The Atlantic found her fascinating and offered to publish her diary, and it was serialized over two years. As they were preparing to publish it as a book, they ran into trouble. In her diary (from when she was 6 and 7 years old), Opal claimed to be adopted by her natural parents; and, after that part was published, anonymous letters arrived supposedly substantiating her claims – and then were found to be sent by Opal herself. The veracity of the diary itself was questioned: could a child write a diary as detailed and elaborate as that, with passages in French? People were found who claimed they had seen her writing it as an adult.

Opal was canceled and so was her book.

As an adult, she published some poetry, moved to England, and published her diary there. Although suffering from schizophrenia, she met French aristocracy, traveled across India, wrote a book about the Kingdom of Udaipur, visited Rome and Vienna, lived in a convent and then – dropped by the very people who had lifted her up – became a ward of the City of London where, during WWII, she scavenged books from bombed out buildings. She was eventually found to be unable to care for herself and was sent to live in a mental institution.

Which is where she was when Benjamin Holt found a copy of her book and became entranced with her story.

In my mind, the story of her life is far more interesting than the story of her diary itself, with its quaint syntax and precocious thoughts. At the time, such things were popular – think about the first book of Anne of Green Gables, where Anne imagines that the blossoming tree outside her window is a bridal veil and gives even the simplest stream a majeloquent title – those were my least favorite parts. Or consider Arthur Conan Doyle, father of the sophisticated and skeptical Sherlock Holmes, being swept away in a belief of fairies because two girls (old enough to know better) cut out drawings of pixies and photographed themselves with the cut outs.

Perhaps I am too much of a Marilla. I want to believe. I like the idea of elves and pixies and little girls who can talk to animals. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

And I was just not into this book as much as my mother was.