The Summer of Ordinary Ways: A
Memoir by Nicole Lea Helget
Minnesota Farm Girl Exposes Family Skeletons In Her Brave, Beautiful Ten Short-
Storied Memories Of Six Summers Tell- All
Practicing baseball with Dad, then watching him go after a cow with a
pitchfork in a fit of rage. Playing chicken on the county road with semi
trucks full of hogs. Flirting with the milkman. Chasing with your sisters after
Wreck and Bump, mangy mutts who prowl farmsteads killing chickens and
drinking fuel oil. Dandelion wine. The ghost of a girl buried alive over a
century ago. These unforgettable, sometimes hilarious images spill from a
fierce and wondrous childhood into the pages of The Summer of Ordinary
Ways.
―Helget wrings intensity from the seemingly mundane—a family farm, the
kitchen, a sleepy Midwestern town—to recreate a past that lives on
somewhere between a dream and a nightmare. In The Summer of
Ordinary Ways, every detail is authentic and resonant, e very moment feels
lived. Helget’s debut is nothing short of remarkable.‖ —Rosellen Brown,
author of Tender Mercies ―Marvelous, vibrant, and full of gritty energy,
carrying the reader on a breathless ride across hills and valleys of pain,
humor, and redemption.‖—Faith Sullivan, author of The Cape Ann
―Written with blistering beauty, this fierce memoir is an elegy for broken
spirits—human and animal—and a prayer for those able to face their past.
‖ —Bart Schneider, author of Beautiful Inez ―After Helget lulls you with
the simplicity so often mistakenly ascribed to country life, she takes your
breath away with the sheer power and poetry of her emotional integrity.‖ —
Booklist (starred review) ―In precise, cadenced prose, this gifted young
author has taken the messiest of lives and fashioned something
beautiful.‖—People magazine (Critic’s Choice, four stars)
Nicole Lea Helget studies and teaches at Minnesota State University –
Mankato. She is the winner of the 2004 Speakeasy Prize for Prose. This is
her first book.
Personal Review: The Summer of Ordinary Ways: A Memoir by
Nicole Lea Helget
"Memoir is recreation of memory in a literary form," writes Nicole "Colie"
Helget in the Acknowledgement section of her unusual, telling memoir.
Helget, the eldest of six Catholic girls raised on a farm in rural Minnesota,
waxes poetic at times in these spectacularly written recountings of her
youth. Nine of the ten selections took place when she was six to twelve
years old. The most recent, Burn to Black, in which she recalls her
mother's incineration of her adulterous, family-deserting husband's prized
and otherwised possessions, took place in 1993 when the author was
seventeen. But the last (and title) story brings the reader closer to the
present with a sort of summary of her later life (love, marriage,
motherhood) interwoven with a graphic memory of what my own former-
farmer father used to refer to as "getting rid of the puppies." Throughout,
her tales tell that her dad could be, and often was - cruel, but also had a
kind side as shown in Cockleburs in the Laundry and her
acknowledgement, "Bless you for your generosity, loyalty, and storytelling."
He's unlikely to feel the same about her after reading of his portrayal.
Subjects range from a crush on a milkman, experiences with moonshi ne
(complete with recipes for wine and whiskey), a "religious retreat weekend
with the Sisters of Schoenstatt" with friends, playing Chicken with a "slow-
witted" maternal uncle, and the first fabulous story, Stain You Red, which
contrasts facts about her sort of famous former baseball player father's
career with an incident involving an uncooperative cow, a pitchfork, and
lots of blood. The book's no holds barred format is as spectacular as it is
sometimes squirm-inducing. But you have to give the gal credi t for her
fabulous writing, poetic at times, and honesty in the face of certain small-
town familial embarrassment. Abuse, abandonment, and Catholic
inculcation failed to "take" in this self-reliant, defiant young woman (p 165)
"What if, instead of discovering the Truth, you are told the Truth, and are
told any variance from it will result in Hell?" whose claim to fame, I hope,
will be as an excellent short-story writer. Also good: The Horizontal World
by Debra Marquat, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, a nd The Mother
Garden by Robin Romm.
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