Chasing Grace

September 2, 1996
Manning, who had a critical success with Undercurrents, fares less well here, perhaps because her book veers between the modes of Mary McCarthy's Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood and Erma Bombeck's domestic epistles. Bombeck's shoes pinch this derivative author, as witness the episode of burying her daughter's dead goldfish. Keara, who has more sense of non-occasion than her mom, smartly dismisses the ceremony as "really gross." Child psychologist Manning's "bad-mother mistakes" take a toll on the reader, if not on her only child, who receives her mother's cloying "last will and testament" in these pages. But when Manning recreates her own childhood as the eldest of six offspring of Catholic parents, readers, especially those whose youth spanned the pre- and Vatican II eras, will feel a glow as she recalls the drill: for example, earned "indulgences" (known among Manning's Long Island classmates as "Purgatory Parole") and high school sex education taught by celibates. God, remembers Manning, was like Santa Clause, "essentially benign but waiting for you to screw up." Each section of the memoir is titled with a sacrament, with Barbie dolls turning up under Holy Orders--a confusion of the McCarthy-Bombeck protocols that plague the book. $50,000 ad/promo; author tour.

August 1, 1996
This is a witty and often irreverent memoir of growing up Catholic and the pursuit of grace. Manning remembers attending Our Lady Queen of Angels School as a fifth-grader, wearing a green uniform, singing in the choir, linking hands on the playground, and passing notes. As a teenager, she discovers boys, eventually gets married, and has a little girl. Along the way, she treats readers to other aspects of her life. Catholic Relief Services invited Manning to El Salvador to inspect their projects to maintain peace and rebuild a war-torn country. She listens to Rosa's stories of bravery, hardship, and suffering, only to feel compassion and humility and to know that, as an American, her riches are predicated by Rosa's poverty. In the end, the author celebrates her love for her family, relatives, and friends. Through them, she learns that chasing grace is no longer necessary. Wherever they are, grace is. Make friends with silence, and you'll never be alone. ((Reviewed Aug. 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)

August 1, 1996
Manning (Undercurrents, LJ 2/15/96) uses the theme of the seven sacraments--"the essence of the gifts and the challenges of any life"--to offer poignant, witty, often caustic, though always engaging thoughts on growing up Catholic in the Fifties. She also comments on families and social responsibilities. Though she struggles with her Catholic past and its influence, her forte is celebrating vivid memories and universal epiphanies. In "Sick," she delivers a scathing documentary on the callousness of hospital personnel, simultaneously saluting an elderly fellow patient for providing the tender loving care she desperately needed. In other essays, she creates a milieu of intimacy, confessing to the cruelties she perpetrated on her siblings, the rage and passionate love she feels toward her own daughter, and her appreciation of her parents' generosity and quirks. Thoroughly grounded, but morally and spiritually transcendent, Manning's meditations will appeal to thoughtful readers of every persuasion.--Nancy M. Laskowski, Free Lib. of Philadelphia