Any Given Day
By Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux
Warner Books, 287 pages, $19.95
It’s probable that Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux is the first 98-year-old great-great-grandmother ever to be paid $1 million for her memoir.
Even more astonishing is that a publisher gave the Manhattan, Kan., woman such a huge sum for her life story even though she had neither met nor slept with anyone famous.
So what is there for the reader in “Any Given Day”?
Foveaux gives us the inside story of a no-frills life. Her circumstances were certainly plain, though not simple.
Life began happily enough. There were the years in Missouri, where her father was a farm laborer, and then the clan’s return to the town of Manhattan so that her ailing mother could be near her family. It’s the kind of childhood that can give rise to a question like, “How did we ever play fox and geese in the snow?” weighed down as they were by the heavy clothes the young wore then.
During World War I, the author worked in the laundry at the local Army camp, awaiting the return of the young doctor to whom she was engaged. She made herself a white satin wedding dress, then folded it away when word of his death came. Instead she married Bill Foveaux, a man she didn’t love, who fathered her eight children. He was an alcoholic. In the years to come, life went from worse to worse still.
“Every time I had to tell someone I couldn’t pay a bill, I died a little,” she writes at one point. “The 1930s were hard to live through,” she confides at another. Throughout, Foveaux is given to understatement.
She had a long, hard go before life came right. During World War II, back working in the Army laundry, she divorced. After the war she worked as a nurse’s aide, but tragedy wasn’t done with her. In 1949, her oldest daughter died of tuberculosis and one of her sons suffered a head injury that confined him to a hospital until he died in 1982.
Today she has survived five of her children. Still living in the wood-frame house she has occupied since 1923, she has 15 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren. The memoir, the product of a writing class she took in 1979, was set down to inform them of her life and times.
Is it compelling reading? Frankly, no. But it is interesting, and at moments, genuinely evocative. The little girl who loves fishing more than anything else and on one memorable trip sees a man shot dead in a train station sticks in a reader’s mind.
If the book is also confusing — it’s impossible to get the many relationships straight — it must be taken into account that it was written for family. So perhaps we should settle for what’s there on the page, possibly taking to heart the advice Granny Foveaux pens for the kids.
“Don’t be influenced by what they call the Beautiful People,” she admonishes them. “They’re on a toboggan headed for a big crash.”