Book Beginnings: One Thousand White Women

Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader. Anyone can participate; just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading.

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus

"As a child growing up in Chicago, I used to scare my kid brother, Jimmy, silly at night telling him stories about our mad ancestor, May Dodd, who lived in an insane asylum and ran off to live with Indians--at least that was the fertile, if somewhat vague, raw material of secret family legend."

As an adult, "Will," this "author," finds out the story about his ancestor is true and tracks down her journals from that time period, which make up the rest of this novel. This prefacing material helps to ground the story and give is context, but it also is likely the cause of all the readers who mistakenly believe this book is nonfiction. (Hence my use of quotes above.)