We Are All Welcome Here - book review

In the forward to "We Are All Welcome Here" by Elizabeth Berg, the author makes the unusual admission that the idea for the novel was proposed to her by a woman who wanted her mother's story to be told. Naturally, Ms. Berg told the woman that she didn't work that way and that the woman should write her own story. In the end Berg was convinced the woman would not or could not write the story and was also convinced that there was really a story to be told. Berg then concludes with the assurance that the book is a complete work of fiction, none of the characters are real, any similarity blah, blah, blah. For me this forward sounded too much like a politician promising he won't raise taxes and the more he talks the more worried you should be.

The story's main characters are Mrs. Paige Dunn who contracted polio while pregnant and actually delivered her daughter while in an iron lung, and the daughter Diana, and the black housekeeper/substitute mother Peacie. The daughter is pretty much the narrator so the action is all from her point of view. She is a responsible young lady on the verge of puberty but not yet boy crazy. The action takes place in the late 1950's and early 1960's and is very real for those of us who remember the polio scare, the freedom marches for school integration in the south, and even the early years of Elvis Presley. Berg is able to weave all of these very real historical stories into a personal quest of a young mother, abandoned by her equally young husband, to raise her daughter "right" in spite of horrendous handicaps.

Berg develops each character so that you're sure you would recognize them on the street or in the corner grocery store. Like a good writer and observer of humanity, she also shows the warts and wrinkles, sometimes to our shock and disappointment. And the "evil" social worker is defended as really only wanting what's best for the mother and the daughter.

There are no fairy tale answers for the problems that arise in this "truer than life" novel. But the answers are acceptable, realistic, and probably the best that could have been done. Only those of us who saw some of the film clips of the freedom marches or walked arm in arm with blacks who had only a brutal beating to look forward to can really read into this story what awaits Peacie's husband LaRue in Mississippi. And only those who have known and loved a person chained to an iron lung or even its more portable successor can appreciate the helplessness of Mrs. Dunn. But Berg does an excellent job of reminding us all of the genuine work of humanity. I say if this story isn't true, it ought to be.