Occasions of Sin (Revised)

by Sandra Scofield

Book Overview

In 1959, when Sandra Scofield was fifteen, she came home to stay in West Texas after years in Catholic boarding schools. She believed her presence would inspire her invalid mother to live. What she found--a fractured family; a distracted, dying mother--nudged her into the tumult of late adolescence and the awakening of her sexuality. More than forty years later, Scofield looks back on her Catholic girlhood and the ways in which her relationship...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393327213
• ISBN13: 9780393327212
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 258 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Beautifully Evocative Memoir

Sandra Scofield has written a beautifully evocative memoir that captures the essence of that most mysterious relationship--the one we have with the being that carried us in her body and brought us into the world, our mother. Is there anyone who knows her mother's secrets? Who understands what she felt and experienced, what fears she faced, what triumphs she claimed as her own? Ms. Scofield's memoir drew me deeply into reflections of my relationship with my own mother, set me to wondering about all the unknowns, made me wish I had asked more questions of her. Occasions of Sin tells of a young girl growing up Catholic in West Texas in the fifties with a chronically ill mother, a devoted, opinionated grandmother, and a vague, absentee father. Without blinking or flinching, she records the agony, the ennui, and the unintentional cruelty of being a teenager. She touches that primordial collective chord that leads directly back into our own experiences, so that each incident, each emotional upheaval connects with the reader at a visceral level. Though my Pagan-Protestant/public school upbringing couldn't have been more different than Ms. Scofield's devout Catholic/convent school life, her emotional honesty and attention to detail brought me right into her experience and allowed me to see and feel things along with her. She writes about her first boyfriend: "There were only a few things to do on a date, but they were new to me. I loved getting ready. I put together outfits and ran in to see what Mother thought. I took some hems up, let others down. She tugged and adjusted and picked off lint. She gave me money to buy mascara and new lipstick. Friday nights Larry and I usually went to the teen center. The last dance was always romantic and I anticipated his suggestion that we go somewhere to park. Maybe he would say, 'Want to take a drive?' My friend Rita had said I shouldn't agree to go past the city limits. Girls who did that went all the way in more ways than one. We could park by the football field, or at the construction site of the new high school--places everyone knew. There would be other couples in other cars, and the sense of someone nearby was like a phantom chaperone. Sometimes a police car might drive slowly by, but if things were quiet, the cops never bothered anyone." The women's relationships in this memoir are deep and complex. A long-held secret colors and confuses Sandra's family life. She puzzles over her father's detachment, her beloved grandmother's harsh judgmental attitudes, her mother's rebellious anger. Her struggles to be holy, to be lovable, and to make her mother proud, echo poignantly through everyone's childhood. Her grief, anger and yearning are palpable when her world is turned upside-down at her mother's death. She says, "When I think of being a little girl, it always ends that day, a blip of fool's innocence all out of place in my fifteenth year, the day after Christmas 1959; that was the last time I thought the p

a compassionate, unsentimental reflection on coming of age

I was first introduced to Scofield's bright and tight prose last summer, and read two of her novels before coming to her memoir. For writers and readers interested in the cross-fertilization between fiction and reality, reading her latest novel, Plain Seeing, and then reading Occasions of Sin provides a great object lesson in the entwining of the two. Events that might appear resolved in the novel are unraveled in the memoir, only to be reknit in a different pattern. And what permeates most strongly from Occasions of Sin is the mature and forgiving voice of the narrator/author, who cuts a slice of life, observes it with compassion, humor, and a healthy distance, and shares it with the world. It is at once a testimony and a quiet, unsentimental celebration of a particular family, whose members endure through poverty and illness, adapt, and move on. I am now reading Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage, which is also a memoir about a young woman coming to age in a family life and culture governed by religion. While Scofield's story takes place mostly in Texas, and is structured around her mother's adoption of Catholicism, Ahmed's privileged childhood was spent in Cairo and Alexandria, and was governed by Islam. Still, I found some interesting and powerful threads running through the two works.

"Occasions for Pleasure"

A new book by Sandra Scofield is always an occasion for pleasure and this memoir, which has been long awaited,delivers great satisfaction. Faithful readers of Scofield's many wonderful and personal novels have been waiting to hear the personal stories of her life to see how everything comes together. As always the writing is evocative and nostalgic,and the mother-daughter relationship here is rendered with such care. This puts into a clearer light all the other memorable mother-daughter pairs in the other novels. If you've ever read Scofield before, you will want to read this memoir now. If you haven't read Scofield before, this is a great place to start. I recommend it highly. Having reviewed her books (and many others)professionally, I can truthfully say that this is a gem.

a memoir of religiousity and abandonment

Sandra Scofield has written a moving description of her life as a Catholic convert growing up in northwest Texas in the early '50s. Her experiences at the Academy of Mary Immaculate in Wichita Falls recall the year I spent there in 1953-54 before moving to the Catholic school across town. This is a world where girls align stones on the ground at recess to outline the rooms of an "abbey" (or "home," in my case) in which they play. Sandra is not the only young girl to have made an altar at home or to have knelt at a neighbor's house for the weekly Rosary and I was excited to revive these memories through her prose. If I'm not mistaken, the cover photo is of the local public swimming pool called "Sandy Beach," a concrete "beach" surrounded by a chain link fence. Perhaps this is a metaphor for her dying mother - a woman of great promise but few resources to adequately nurture either herself or her daughter. Fortunately, the Catholic schools valued academic achievement and provided Sandra with the only stable home she had, but only in the context of a religious ecstasy cultivated initially by her mother. Since I shared that alternate reality, perhaps it was not the exclusive purview of her and her mother, but rather a more general effect of Red River Valley Catholic culture of the '50s. The lack of nuturing and loss of her mother take their toll, and the maturing Sandra endures devastating humiliation. This memoir and her previous works attest to her survival, but this book ends long before these accomplishments. I would highly recommend this book based on the compelling nature of its elegantly simple and straightforward prose, but I wonder how much of my pleasure in reading this came from the memories evoked by Sandra's earlier experiences at AMI and in Wichita Falls.

A rapturous memoir of difficult family love

This is a deeply personal story of a very bright girl growing up with a mother who would die young. The mother was sensitive, intelligent and exquisitely beautiful (beautiful enough to go to Hollywood, which she did indeed for a time); in the end though, she was also unable to escape from the constrictions of her working class life and a debilitating disease which took her when her daughter was seventeen. The growing girl also adored her grandmother, a more down to earth woman, who provided much needed stability, but the girl was caught between the two women who often quarreled. "I went from mother to grandmother as if I carried two passports" writes Sandra Scofield, but in the end it is from these two strong feminine forces pushing and pulling that the girl will form years later into a much acclaimed novelist and teacher.Sandra Scofield writes perceptively of the ways in which each person's individuality presses against those closest to them, how we press back, and how from these forces we eventually emerge in our own shape and way of being, claiming the memories of our journey and becoming our own force in the world. A beautiful book. The mother's fate is heartbreaking, the grandmother stalwart and though exasperating at times always faithful, and the memoir of them both unforgettable.Particularly recommended for women who loved their mothers but did not always have an easy time with them, and that includes many women I know for certain.