Chasing Grace: Reflections of a Catholic Girl, Grown Up

In this exuberant chronicle of the journey from girlhood to adulthood, Martha Manning turns her trademark wit and incisive pen to the story of her quintessentially Irish-American Catholic upbringing. Droll and touching, Chasing Grace paints an unforgettable portrait of childhood, family, community, and the ways that faith shapes and colors a life.
Recalling her pratfalls, sorrows, and delights - both as a mischievous schoolgirl and a wife and mother reflecting on her past - Manning weaves her memoir around the seven sacraments of Catholic tradition: baptism, penance, communion, confirmation, holy orders, marriage, and last rites. Doing hilarious battle with her nun schoolteachers, eavesdropping on the grownups, negotiating the early stages of marriage, and watching her own daughter grow into a young girl - each episode in Manning's life is illuminated by the rituals of faith.

Manning, who had a critical success with Undercurrents, fares less well here, perhaps because her book veers between the modes of Mary McCarthy's Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood and Erma Bombeck's domestic epistles. Bombeck's shoes pinch this derivative author, as witness the episode of burying her daughter's dead goldfish. Keara, who has more sense of non-occasion than her mom, smartly dismisses the ceremony as "really gross." Child psychologist Manning's "bad-mother mistakes" take a toll on the reader, if not on her only child, who receives her mother's cloying "last will and testament" in these pages. But when Manning recreates her own childhood as the eldest of six offspring of Catholic parents, readers, especially those whose youth spanned the pre- and Vatican II eras, will feel a glow as she recalls the drill: for example, earned "indulgences" (known among Manning's Long Island classmates as "Purgatory Parole") and high school sex education taught by celibates. God, remembers Manning, was like Santa Clause, "essentially benign but waiting for you to screw up." Each section of the memoir is titled with a sacrament, with Barbie dolls turning up under Holy Orders?a confusion of the McCarthy-Bombeck protocols that plague the book. $50,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Manning, a clinical psychologist who wrote lyrically and humorously about her battle with depression in Undercurrents (1995), here offers by contrast the pedestrian memoir of a self- acclaimed casualty of Catholicism. Manning divides her book into short sections on such topics as ``Sin,'' ``Hell,'' and ``Absolution,'' breezing from one bland reflection to the next about Catholic girlhood. There's much stock scenery here: the tyrannical nuns and their heated warnings about the danger of boys looking up one's skirt; the brainwashing prolife lectures and scary films about childbirth; the lousy taste of the host at the First Communion. Sex was evil and impure: ``The fact that women who endured twelve to fourteen years of Catholic School are not all virgins or prostitutes is a miracle.'' The author skims the surface of the church's problems for (and with) women. Her text often seems more like the record of a pleasurable, meandering conversation among women exchanging anecdotes about their childhood than a measured, reflective study. Manning wants to be transgressive by speaking up as an enlightened woman, yet this is as G-rated as it comes. Her book lacks the irony, the wit, and certainly the richness of Mary McCarthy's memoir of Catholic girlhood, which was filled with twisted characters and real Gothic horrors, powerfully described. Manning's experiences sound mild by comparison. In fact, she seems so little held by her subject matter that she sometimes glides into curiously tangential vignettes: One night she follows a yuppie couple in the supermarket, seething resentfully as they select their gourmet items while she shuffles along with her fiscally challenged cart. Some of Manning's mild recollections might work at essay length; overall, the book lacks substance and freshness. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This is a witty and often irreverent memoir of growing up Catholic and the pursuit of grace. Manning remembers attending Our Lady Queen of Angels School as a fifth-grader, wearing a green uniform, singing in the choir, linking hands on the playground, and passing notes. As a teenager, she discovers boys, eventually gets married, and has a little girl. Along the way, she treats readers to other aspects of her life. Catholic Relief Services invited Manning to El Salvador to inspect their projects to maintain peace and rebuild a war-torn country. She listens to Rosa's stories of bravery, hardship, and suffering, only to feel compassion and humility and to know that, as an American, her riches are predicated by Rosa's poverty. In the end, the author celebrates her love for her family, relatives, and friends. Through them, she learns that chasing grace is no longer necessary. Wherever they are, grace is. Make friends with silence, and you'll never be alone. Theresa Ducato

Manning (Undercurrents, LJ 2/15/96) uses the theme of the seven sacraments?"the essence of the gifts and the challenges of any life"?to offer poignant, witty, often caustic, though always engaging thoughts on growing up Catholic in the Fifties. She also comments on families and social responsibilities. Though she struggles with her Catholic past and its influence, her forte is celebrating vivid memories and universal epiphanies. In "Sick," she delivers a scathing documentary on the callousness of hospital personnel, simultaneously saluting an elderly fellow patient for providing the tender loving care she desperately needed. In other essays, she creates a milieu of intimacy, confessing to the cruelties she perpetrated on her siblings, the rage and passionate love she feels toward her own daughter, and her appreciation of her parents' generosity and quirks. Thoroughly grounded, but morally and spiritually transcendent, Manning's meditations will appeal to thoughtful readers of every persuasion.?Nancy M. Laskowski, Free Lib. of Philadelphia
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.