You Can Go Home Again: Country Roads interviews St. Francisville native Rod Dreher on his forthcoming book about just that.
Thirty years ago Rod Dreher left Louisiana, determined to outrun the deep family and community roots that struck a smart, bookish sixteen-year-old growing up in St. Francisville as intolerably oppressive. In September 2011, after building a national career as a journalist in Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C., Dreher moved back. Why? Because a family tragedy—his sister Ruthie Leming’s death from cancer—revealed to Dreher that the same community bonds that seemed to bind him as a teen were the very forces holding his family together. And the outpouring of grace that accompanied Ruthie’s death transfigured his hometown for him. On April 8 Dreher’s memoir, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town and the Secret of a Good Life will be released by Grand Central Publishing. As he prepares for his national book tour, Dreher took a little time to talk about family, faith, small towns, large towns, and coming home.
CR: In 2011, your sister Ruthie Leming's untimely illness and death from lung cancer forced you to see the town where you were born and raised in a new light. You wrote The Little Way of Ruthie Leming in response. What did the experience of her illness teach you about your hometown that you didn't already know?
RD: I already knew I was from a good place. What I didn’t know was the depth of the goodness, and how much it would matter in a crisis like the one my family was in. On the day Ruthie was diagnosed – Mardi Gras, 2010 – I flew in from Philadelphia to be with my family. To see all those familiar West Feliciana people at the hospital, where many of them had been since the morning of her surgery – well, it made a strong impression. They were not just there in spirit; they were there. And they continued to be there for the Lemings, and for my mom and dad, for the entire 19 months of Ruthie’s cancer fight – including staging a big fundraising concert for Ruthie, to help her pay medical bills, and simply to honor her, for all she meant to them.
It’s not that it surprised me that people in West Feliciana would be that good. It’s that it came so naturally to them, and that it mattered so very, very much. We all think that in a perfect world, people would be this good to each other, but this, alas, is not a perfect world. Well, people were as good as gold to Ruthie and her family. This is the way it’s supposed to be. I’ve spent a decade or so writing from time to time about how we’ve lost that sense of community in American life, with all our rootlessness. But there it was, right in my hometown, all along.
CR: You left St. Francisville many years ago, to escape what seemed then to be the constraints of a small town existence. Yet now you have come back, and brought your family with you. What changed: The hometown? Or the hometown boy?
RD: Well, St. Francisville has changed in the last 30 years, and very much for the better. The people who moved in from Baton Rouge have, I think, brought with them a certain culture and set of interests that have made West Feliciana more diverse. Plus, it’s hard to overstate what a difference having the Magnolia Café and the Bird Man coffee shop makes to the cultural sensibility of the town. I had neither growing up. I’m glad that the old West Feliciana things I grew up with – hunting, fishing, and sports – are still here, but I’m also glad that there are more things going on today for people who don’t find their niche in those activities. No kidding, one of the things that made my wife Julie and I think seriously about moving back here was years of reading Country Roads when we would come home to visit my folks two or three times a year. Neither one of us had any idea there was so much interesting stuff to do around here.
But mostly, the hometown boy changed. I had a rough experience in high school here with bullying, cliquishness, and the intolerance for difference that seems so characteristic of small towns. When I left, I never thought I would come back. The close bonds in the community struck 16-year-old me as oppressive, and I wanted to break free.
My sister never left, but rather stayed here and deepened her West Feliciana roots, which my family has had for more than five generations. She married her high school sweetheart, taught school, built a house right across the yard in Starhill from where we grew up, and enjoyed the fullness of the country life. I didn’t begrudge her that one bit, but I knew it wasn’t for me.
Ruthie’s lung cancer was a deep shock. Part of the shock was that she was only 40 years old, in good health, had never smoked, a mom with three kids and countless friends, and had lived a good, clean life. And there she was, boom, with terminal cancer. It made me realize that there’s just no telling what could happen to you. No matter how hard you try to protect yourself from disease and calamity, it can find you. By this time, I was in my 40s, and I had more maturity about life and its frailty than I did at 16. Granted, nothing prepared me for the harsh fact of Ruthie’s cancer, but I at least by then knew that terrible things happen to good people.
So, when I saw how utterly vulnerable cancer made Ruthie and her family, and how so many people in the community rallied to their side, I was deeply moved – and moved not just emotionally, but philosophically. That is, I saw that the same deep and strong communal bonds that had held me back when I was a teenager were the only things holding my sister and her family together in this trial. Ruthie’s suffering and death, and the outpouring of grace that came from it, transfigured the town for me, made me see that the thing that caused me to run away in pain as a teenager was the very thing that made me want to come back as a middle-aged man. It’s not too much to say that it healed me. That’s a paradox, but it’s true. Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
CR: You grew up here, but lived in New York, Dallas, Philadelphia, before returning home. What does a small town do better than a large one?
RD: The problem with small-town life is that everybody knows your business. The blessing of small-town life is that everybody knows your business. That means that when you suffer, you don’t suffer anonymously. As a young man, I loved the variety and the anonymity of the big city, and am so glad I was able to experience that. But after a while, it can get lonely, especially when you have children. You may find that you long for life among people who aren’t strangers. When Ruthie and I got sick, Julie and I wondered what we would do if something like that happened to us. We had just moved to Philly, and though we were making friends, we simply didn’t have the kind of community there that Ruthie did. It’s not that people are necessarily more hard-hearted in Philly, or anywhere else; it’s that Julie and I never lived in one place long enough to put down roots. I know it’s possible for city people to stay in their neighborhoods long enough to build these relationships, but cities are transient places. Rootlessness is a way of life there in a way that it just isn’t, and can’t be, in a small town.
A few months ago, our son Lucas, who is nine, took a bad spill on his bike in front of the library here in St. Francisville. His cousin Amy was driving by, saw him crying and injured, picked him up, and drove him home. Before Amy got there, people had rushed over to help and comfort him. Lucas told his mother and me that when everybody came to help him, they all knew who he was, and that was a great comfort to him. That’s what a small town does better than a large one.
CR: In full, the title of your book is The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. What secret had Ruthie discovered that you needed to come back to understand?
RD: I wouldn’t put it quite that way. I think the secret of a good life that I learned from my sister is what made it possible for me to come home.
First, I learned from her experience the importance of community. She had it, I didn’t. We were building it in Philly, where we were developing close friendships with families in our homeschooling cooperative, but we knew that if we were going to have what Ruthie had, we would have to commit to staying there the rest of our lives. Could we do that, even if we wanted to? I don’t know. Besides, our community was scattered all over the metropolitan area. It’s hard to have a thick community when its members live so far from each other. It seemed to us that our family down in Louisiana might need us after Ruthie’s passing, and in any case we needed them, and we needed and wanted to be around the good people we had been with in the days after Ruthie’s passing.
One of Ruthie’s former students, Ashley Jones, drove 17 hours from Nebraska to come to the funeral. After she heard that Ruthie’s friends had sat with her body all night long in the Methodist church before her funeral, praying, laughing, singing, and telling stories about the good times, Ashley went back to Nebraska, quit her job, and moved home. As she told me when I interviewed her for the book, she wanted to be back in south Louisiana, in a town where people would do that kind of thing for her if she died. It’s that kind of thing that occasioned my own epiphany about this place.
Second, and maybe more important, Ruthie knew that a good life is not measured by professional achievement, or the accumulation of things and experiences. The name of the book, The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming, alludes to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the French Carmelite who died young in her convent. After her death, the nuns discovered her writings, and had them published, to worldwide acclaim. Thérèse is now one of the most beloved saints of the Catholic Church, and her “little way” is a guide to spirituality for millions. What Thérèse saw was that it wasn’t given to all of us to live a big and eventful life, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t be great. “What matters in life are not great deeds, but great love,” she wrote.
Ruthie was not Catholic, and knew nothing of St. Thérèse, but that’s how she lived. I saw, especially in the days after her death, overwhelming evidence that this small-town schoolteacher, a country girl who never wanted to leave the West Feliciana hills, had achieved a life of true spiritual greatness and moral grandeur. People kept telling our family how Ruthie had helped them. I talked to a couple of her former students for the book, and they told me how Ruthie had seen how much they were struggling, not only in school, but in their lives, and had reached out to them and loved them and given them the strength to overcome. Over and over we heard these stories.
I don’t believe you have to move to a small town to learn from Ruthie’s example. There’s no reason I couldn’t have lived this kind of life in Philadelphia, or anywhere else. What Ruthie taught me, though, was that my desires to do big things with my life were not necessarily wrong, but out of scale. Ruthie did big things – huge things! – with her life, in a rural south Louisiana parish. The difference she made in the lives of so many children was incredible. She taught me that you don’t have to live in a great city to do great things, and that the measure of a life is not what you did and where you did it, but how much you loved.
CR: Is this a universal story? Could it have happened anywhere?
RD: In theory, yes, it could have happened anywhere. The opportunity to show love and compassion to the suffering, and to be a good neighbor, is universal. I don’t want people to read Little Way and think that they have to pick up and move to a small town to live as Ruthie lived. Wherever there are people, there is a community, or at least a potential community. And there is a potential for spiritual greatness, no matter how humble your vocation.
That said, there is something special about south Louisiana, and the way we live here. The gentleness of people, you know? I’ve known this since I left way back in 1992. No matter where I’ve lived, I’ve told people stories about back home, and they think I’m making it up. I never was making it up. A California friend one time told me that I did my best writing when I was writing about Louisiana. I told her she might be right, but it was a shame that I could never see living there again. How happy I was to be wrong about that! That was the gift my sister left for me.
I can’t say for sure, but there might be something special about St. Francisville too. One of the local firefighters told me after Ruthie died that he was pumping gas into his truck somewhere near Baton Rouge, and got to talking to somebody at the next pump. When the stranger found out the firefighter was from St. Francisville, it turns out the man had heard about the fundraising concert they did for Ruthie. “Man, y’all take care of each other up there,” the stranger said.
CR: Some of the most powerful images you capture describe the outpouring of support from the local community during Ruthie's illness. You relate not only the extraordinary acts of kindness, but also the joy and laughter that were there, even in the heart of a tragedy. Do you think that is a Louisiana thing? Or a community thing? Or a Ruthie thing?
RD: All three. Seriously. Like I said, we really are different in Louisiana, at least in south Louisiana, and part of that difference is an attitude towards life that brings to mind the words of the poet W.H. Auden: “Stagger onward rejoicing.” It’s a basic stance of gratitude towards life, and pleasure in its gifts. You grow up here and you think everybody’s like that, but then you leave Louisiana and realize no, there really is an art to living that we do better than most.
But it’s also a community thing. One of the great things about living in West Feliciana is that we have a special knack for eccentricity. My late uncle, Murphy Dreher, was the master of this kind of thing. He launched the Bopotamus Festival, a community party for an animal that doesn’t exist. People around here just love to get together and have a good time, even through the tears.
It’s true, though, that this was a Ruthie thing. She inspired so much love and loyalty in her friends. Abby Temple Cochran, her closest friend, told me that she had never seen anything like the outpouring after Ruthie’s death. People wanted to be together to eat, drink, and celebrate Ruthie’s life, in a way that Abby had never before witnessed. Plus, I don’t think I’ve ever heard in our day of people spending the night with a friend’s body in a church, keeping the dead friend company all through the night with song, prayer, and laughter. They even brought lawn chairs and sand from the Starhill Riviera, at Thompson Creek, where Ruthie spent so much time having fun. Ruthie would have loved every minute of it.
CR: In the book you are very candid about the tensions that existed in the relationship between Ruthie and yourself, both as kids and adults. If Ruthie could have read it, is there anything you think would have surprised her?
RD: I think she would have been surprised by how much her rejection hurt me. I don’t think she would have done some of the things she did if she had known. Abby told me that I was the only person on this earth to whom Ruthie wasn’t boundlessly kind. Some of that is a brother-sister thing, and I’m responsible for some of that too, by teasing her so much as a kid. But the truth is – and it’s a difficult truth to face in a book like this, which is about the greatness in my sister’s life – the truth is that for Ruthie, the love of her place in this world meant that she resented me for leaving it behind. I was the brother who left home, who, in her mind, deserted the family, who went off and got above himself. She could be nasty about it. And Ruthie being Ruthie, once she made up her mind about something, she never changed it, and never admitted any facts that challenged what she wanted to believe. I tried several times to talk to her about this, to tear down that wall between us. She wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t even have the conversation. The effects of her judgment are still with my family, as I talk about in the book, and probably always will be.
Ruthie was a saint, I’m convinced, but she wasn’t perfect. Little Way is not just a story about how great my sister was, and how great my town is, but also a story about the pain and conflict that we inflict on each other in our families, and how we overcome it, or fail to. I’ve been struck by how many early readers of the book have told me that they went through similar things in their families, with parents or siblings, and the pain is still very raw. You can hear it in their voices. I hope that Little Way convinces readers to talk about these things, to forgive, and to offer forgiveness. Life is too short to hold on to grudges.
CR: As a social and political writer, your commentary on the big issues facing our society has won you a national audience. What's one misconception about life in a small Louisiana town you hope this book changes amongst your readers in other parts of the country?
RD: It’s no so much life in a small Louisiana town as life in small towns, period. People who grow up in small towns are acculturated to believe that Life Is Elsewhere, that to achieve anything in life, you have to leave. For some of us, that really is true. Someone who has a calling to be a ballet dancer is not going to be able to realize it in a place like St. Francisville. What I hope this book does is make people give a second thought to what life in a small town is, and can be. It requires changing what you value, and rejecting what mainstream culture teaches you are the heights of success. The magazine I write for now is based in Washington. I could be in DC now, going to important events, conferences, and dinner parties. But would I see my kids as often as I do now? Would I have the church life that I do now? I would not. When I die, I would rather be remembered as Ruthie was, than as a guy who had a good career in an exciting city. I hope Little Way helps people in cities and big suburbs to understand that people in small towns may see more deeply into what makes life worth living.
CR: The Little Way is a book about family, and faith, and community. But first and foremost it seems to be a book about belonging. Would you agree?
RD: I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re on to something. We all want to go home – though for many of us “home” is the place where we experience belonging. What drove Odysseus on through his perilous journeys? The call of home. I don’t know if you’ve ever read The Odyssey, but it opens with Odysseus living a life of luxury with the goddess Calypso, who promises him immortality if he will stay with her. He turns it down; he wants to go home. This speaks to something deep within the human spirit. The human condition is one of wayfaring, of pilgrimage. We can only approximate homecoming in this life, I think, but when grace offers you the way home – literally or figuratively – you would be a fool to choose permanent exile. Augustine famously said, “We are restless until our hearts rest in you, O Lord.” As a theological proposition, I believe that’s true. But on a purely emotional level, I think home is where, at the end of our wanderings, we can finally rest.
CR: And … Now that you've been published in Country Roads, will your mama finally be proud?
RD: Funny story: years ago, when I was the chief film critic for the New York Post, which is pretty high up in the journalism profession, my mom told my wife that it was her great hope that one day, Rod would rise to join the staff at Southern Living. Looks like I’m on my way!
