Exploring a mother’s roots to the core

FINDING ANNIE FARRELL: A FAMILY MEMOIR, by Beth Harpaz, St. Martin’s Press, 2004 hardcover, 271 pages, $24.95.

What a daughter assumes she knows about her mother’s life may be very different from what the facts reveal. That is the starting pointing for The Associated Press Travel Editor Beth Harpaz in her book, “Finding Annie Farrell: A Family Memoir,” a beautifully written examination of the people, places and themes that delineated her mother’s life.

After her mother’s death in 1983, Harpaz discovered that her mother’s name was not Annie but Lena. Harpaz responded like any good reporter: She asked, “Why?” and set out to find the answer. Her search led her down the family history trail to many Maine towns, including Athens, Harmony, Wellington, Kingsbury, Mechanic Falls and Van Buren. What she discovered as she delved into the long-hidden details of her mother’s life became the raw material for her book, and included an uncle she didn’t know she had, a grandmother who was most likely an American Indian, her mother’s half brother and Maine roots that went down to bedrock.

Annie Farrell was a beauty, a

Veronica Lake look-alike who was born Lena Farrell in 1922. When Lena was 11, her mother, Lizzie Noyes Farrell, died after childbirth, leaving Lena to tend a brood of younger brothers and sisters while her bereaved blacksmith father tried to find work, not always with much success in the era of the Great Depression. The children suffered neglect, perhaps abuse, and were removed by state welfare authorities to foster homes or state “reform” schools.

Annie-Lena ended up in Augusta living with and working for a judge and his wife. With their help she found work in New York City after graduating from Cony High School. It was in New York City that she met her husband, David, a Jewish World War II hero with a busted arm, a wound he had received in the war.

Like many couples from that era, Annie and David liked to go out on the town. They smoked and drank, practices that over the years took its toll on their health. Annie-Lena suffered from chronic depression, which went undiagnosed.

Harpaz looks at all the details of her mother’s life with the objective and balanced eye of an accomplished reporter. One senses that she is seeking not only to understand her mother’s life but to understand herself. Part of what makes “Finding Annie Farrell” such a riveting read is that Harpaz eschews the role of ‘victim’ that authors all too easily slide into when recounting the down side of being their mother’s daughters.

Harpaz looks at the facts – personal, social and historical – that shaped her mother’s sad life and does not shy from presenting the hard and painful. She uses historical material to form a context for her mother’s life. She also sees the good and precious things she received as a legacy from her mother, especially her mother’s insistence that the family spend a month each summer at a camp on a lake in Maine – “the forest primeval” as her mother called it.

Family photographs head each chapter of “Finding Annie Farrell.” Most readers will look at the photos, as I did, think of old photos in their own family albums and begin to think of what they do or do not know about their own mothers.

Beth Harpaz asked, “Why?” What she found out makes for a book that readers won’t want to put down, not only because it’s well written but because it resonates on so many levels of Maine and human experience. Put this one on your ‘must read’ list.

Ardeana Hamlin can be reached at 990-8153, or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.