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What happens when you write a biography of your grandmother, who's now considered for the initial stages of canonization? A single mother, a Greenwich Village bohemian, a fiery leader of the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day led a long life between 1897 and 1980. She exemplifies a radical leap of faith, for this convert commits herself to the ultimate Gospel aims of eliminating wants, reducing needs, rejecting authority, and loving the poor. The youngest of her nine grandchildren, Kate Hennessy orients her take on her family as a correction to academic or airy studies of Day. "An examination of her life isn't an intellectual, academic, or religious exercise. For me, it is nothing less than a quest to find out who I am through her and through Tamar." For Hennessy's mother Tamar has her own tale to tell, and it's as conflicted as Dorothy's.
Titled after a favorite quote of Dorothy's from Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Hennessy wants to alter the received wisdom about her ancestor. She fears that her grandmother "seems in danger of being lost to the world—a woman of great joy and passion, humor, and love of beauty. Tamar grieved the loss of this vibrant woman to the annals of hagiography and the desire to see her as a saint, and at times to Dorothy's own nature, especially during her 'severe and pious' stage, as Tamar called it." Tamar emerges as a figure no less formidable than Dorothy; that is no small feat. Hennessy sustains their steeliness and fortitude. This narrative charts their various rises and falls.
Yet, early on, we see a softer view of her, before she entered the Church, even if even then she slipped into city churches for a moment or two. The heyday of anarchism and free love reigned, just before the First World War. Hennessy stages this affectionate vignette. "Dorothy would sing to Gene 'Frankie and Johnny' in a way few would forget, this self-possessed girl of twenty, cool-mannered, tweed-wearing, drinking rye whiskey straight with no discernible effect and smoking like a chimney at a time when women weren't allowed to smoke in public. And who brought into the Hell Hole rough-looking men she had encountered at the steps of St. Joseph's Church in need...