Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life

Updated a decade after its original publication, this memoir by Jean Hay Bright chronicles the years in the 1970s when the author and her first husband, a traumatized Vietnam veteran, homesteaded on 25 rugged Maine acres sold to them by Living the Good Life authors Helen and Scott Nearing, and the aftermath of that experience in the decades that followed.Jean also used her investigative reporting skills to try to resolve some long-standing and nagging questions about the Nearings, focusing particularly on their finances over the decades. Her research also turned up some surprising and enlightening facts about how Helen and Scott Nearing actually lived and died.The revised edition has a new Prologue by Susan Hand Shetterly, more family photos, an expanded Afterword, as well as details and a new chapter pulled from Scott Nearing's FBI file, including documentation of Scott's listing in J. Edgar Hoover's Custodial Detention program.

Author Susan Hand Shetterly of Surry, Maine, sent this review to the publisher on Oct. 23, 2003 "Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life" is going to become one of those essential books to read in order to understand the back-to-the-land-movement in Maine. Jean Hay Bright's life in the woods may have been somewhat different from the lives of others trying to make their way out of what they felt was a society mired in corruption - trying to make their way toward a new and better choice - but there are themes common to all, and the first is the Vietnam War. No one should underestimate it. Another is the amount of hard labor we, as young homesteaders, were willing and able to do. To read Hay Bright's account is to bring back the joy of learning how to do for oneself: how to grow food, cook food, survive winters, raise chickens, raise children. Another is the desire to recreate something closer to the frontier family than the suburban family: a small, intense unit back-lit by a kerosene lamp. The War was an evil that came from outside and - if we were one of the lucky - just left us whip-lashed. What made those first, fresh-faced homesteading dreams die eventually came from what we carried inside us into the woods. The utopian life shattered under the weight of our own imperfections.

This is, in a sense, a story as old as time: a walk from innocence into experience. Who we believed in and some of what we believed in failed us. But the journey is important, and what Hay Bright knows we have left - after all this panning for gold - are the few bright nuggets of the real thing.