News

Book News: The Sleeper
Bridget Kinsella -- 10/30/00
Labor Memoir Strikes a Cultural Chord


A 14-year-old's view
of a labor strike.
Author Cheri Register often tells people her Ph.D. (in literature) really stands for Packinghouse Daughter. It is just this kind of simple honesty about class and status in America that appeals to readers of her memoir, Packinghouse Daughter (Minnesota Historical Society Press).
Since its Labor Day release, the attention for Packinghouse Daughter--which recounts Register's childhood in a meatpacking family during the tumultuous 1959 Wilson & Co. strike that split the town of Albert Lea, Minn., and ended only after the governor called in the National Guard--has extended beyond its initial regional appeal. What's more, its trade appeal represents a noticeable shift in focus at the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

"They are doing great things over there, and have moved in the memoir direction over the last few years" said Julie Arthur-Sherman, regional buyer at Barnes & Noble. "A lot of the people they pick are unknowns, but they tell about an era and really speak to an historic time."

While the memoir category seems to be limitless, it is somewhat unusual to see a memoir from an historical society press. "It's really been a dramatic shift in the last two years," said Greg Britton, who joined MHSP as its director at about that same time. When several staffers at the 150-year-old press retired a few years ago, Britton said, the board of directors took the opportunity to make some big changes in its mission.

Typically MHSP had published about eight titles a year; it will produce 20 titles next year. Packinghouse Daughter is part of MHSP's Midwest Reflections series, which was launched in the 1990s. Next year, the press will introduce Native Voices and Contemporary Fiction series. "We are allowed to do a lot of experimenting," Britton added. "In five years, we may not be doing creative new fiction--it might not work for us--but we are going to try it."

Bookseller response to Packinghouse Daughter is more positive than the press ever dreamed it could be. "We knew we had a great book, but it's great to see other people catching on," he said. Packinghouse Daughter is slated for the next Booksense 76 list.

Part of the book's appeal is its universal topic. Register, who studiedScandinavian literature at the University of Chicago, writes about the experience of post-World War II working-class children who were thrust into prosperity through the labor of their parents. "She is neither fish nor fowl," observed Marian Fleischman, manager of Sedalia Book & Toy in Sedalia, Mo. "Anyone who is a changeling is going to have similar feelings."

MHSP has already sold through its first 4,000-copy printing and gone back to press for a second 4,000.

Fleischman said she is handselling Packinghouse Daughter to customers who are interested in essays and nonfiction. Sales are steady, she said, helped largely by the fact that Sedalia is an old railroad town. "What she talks about with the strike at the Wilson plant helps sell it, because people here have lived through stuff like that," she added.

At Drummer Boy Books in Ligonier, Pa., Nancy Young gave her advance reader's copy to an English professor at the nearby Indiana University of Pennsylvania. "She zoomed right in on it," said Young. Many of professor Helen Sitler's freshman students are the first generation in their families to attend college or come from a working-class background. She sent Young an e-mail that said, "Cheri Register's book hits all the themes I've been working with in College Writing: community, a sense of place, historic/economic conditions which impact life in a place, issues of social class, oral history. It's a perfect fit."

Even in the resort area of Brunswick, Ga., former Minnesotan Harold Hicks, co-owner of The Book Shop, is handselling Register's book. "I've dealt with 15 unions in my lifetime," he told PW. "I think she has done a fine job. She captures the essence of the feeling in that time period."

Register teaches writing at the Loft in Minneapolis and is the author of The Chronic Illness Experience: Embracing the Imperfect Life (Hazelden) and 'Are Those Kids Yours?': American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries (Free Press).