Leavings

Leavings begins with Megan's birth in 1927. She is the love child of a Hollywood screenwriter and director, and a narcissistic married woman twenty-four years his senior. Abandoned in the hospital as a newborn and made a ward of the city of Los Angeles, twenty-one-month-old Megan lands in a stable home with strict Pentecostal foster parents who are dutiful in her care, but not loving. As a young child Megan has a strong sense of not belonging-at home, at school, or even at church. She sleeps on a cot at the foot of her foster sister's bed. She is asked to leave first grade after crying for two weeks. She never gets saved at church. Even her name comes and goes, depending on under whose care she falls. Hers is a life marked by continual searching, and repeated leavings-being left by others and being forced to leave. We follow this odd but lovable child, adolescent, and young adult through a solitary life of acute observation and search for identity, from finding her birth father to meeting her half siblings, an early marriage, children, meeting the woman who will be the love of her life and, finally, divorce and freedom. Megan's extraordinary story transports us across many decades and to locations throughout the western United States. Through beautiful prose, she imparts astute commentary on political events with vivid descriptions of the social and moral views of the times. Each encounter shapes her experience of the world, as we witness her journey to a life of belonging and acceptance, a woman who in the end becomes closer to being the person she wants to be.