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Keep a suckling pig as a pet." Those elevator company grew up devouring the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder will recognize that list, and maybe find themselves in it as well. The series of novels was based on Wilder's memories of her childhood as her pioneer family moved across the Midwest in their covered wagon — with "good old Jack, the brindle bulldog" alongside. "I have one memory of being in my parents' room on their bed and reading On the Banks of Plum Creek," McClure tells 's Melissa Block. "
It was over 200 pages, and that seemed just unimaginable to me." The Wilder Life In reading some of the many books about the Little House novels, McClure learned to further spin out the books' fantasies from the hard reality of the family's life, as in the fact that the little house on the prairie itself was an illegal homestead. "That's something that was never really mentioned in the books, that Pa really was probably very knowingly occupying illegal land, hoping that it would eventually open up for homesteading.
There's kind of no excusing Pa on those grounds," McClure says. "At the same time, I think I appreciated the book for at least asking some of the hard questions. It's Laura herself who dares to ask the question, 'Why are we here anyway if this is the Indians' land?' " At the end of her journey, McClure says she began to think about how her relationship to Wilder's books connected back to her life. It's a process she describes by using the word "unremembering." She says it involves building feelings around memory that you hold on to when the reality is "a little too painful to remember it directly."
"I realized my feelings about my mother passing away were tied up in this. That I was, in a way, trying to revisit my own childhood in kind of an oblique way. And after a while, certain things came back: remembering my mom telling me about her own life as an Army brat and moving all over the place. Which seemed really unimaginable to me, but then when I read the Little House books it really sort of gave me the opportunity to sort of understand what that was like," McClure says. "There were times when my mother took us to look at a house where she'd once lived for a year or a few months. And I completely forgot about that until I started these trips on my own to see where this other little girl had lived — Laura."