Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about generational sin –
the negative behaviors and attitudes that get passed down from parent to child
over and over again. We are all a product of our upbringing. As most of us
realize sometime in our teens (if not sooner), our parents are people and they
are flawed. No one has a perfect childhood and most of us experience enough
dysfunction to write a book.
By the same token, we go on to become imperfect parents.
Even with our best efforts, we mess up this challenging parenting experience.
We may make a conscious effort to parent differently from the way we were
raised, but we still make a boatload of mistakes; we just make different ones.
A Good Girl (Texas
Review Press), a new Catholic novel by Johnnie Bernhard, tackles the subject of
generational sin in one Irish-American family. Gracey Reiter is heading home to
South Texas to be with her father, Henry, as he dies. She’s suffering through
the “emotional abyss of a three-decade-old marriage” in which she is a low
priority in her husband’s life and trying to prepare for her daughter’s wedding.
Going back home forces Gracey to look back at her own troubled childhood and the
various life stories of a few generations of grandparents, starting with
Patricia Walsh, a fourteen-year old girl who travelled to America to escape the
poverty of County Galway, Ireland.
Bernhard deftly weaves together the past and present in this
raw, thought-provoking novel. Some of the stories are truly heartbreaking. There
are a couple of troubling moments from a Catholic perspective – Gracey goes to
bed with her future husband on their first date, and the family spreads Henry’s
ashes instead of burying them (which is against Church teaching) – but overall,
A Good Girl is a moving story that
ends with forgiveness and hope for the future.
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