Necessary Lies

Diane Chamberlain, “Necessary Lies,” St. Martins Press, 2013, 339 pp.

No good deed goes unpunished…Oh, Wait…be sure to read the entire book.  I found the book profoundly depressing in its apparent accurate portrayal of a 1960s North Carolina poor rural area, as the protagonist, newly married and recent graduate social worker, Jane Forrester deals with a poor family.  She has a non-supportive husband, co-workers with profoundly different beliefs, and neighborhood women who resent her working.  The book's title is well-chosen and I reflected on its relevance many times on my journey through the book.  I normally read non-fiction but, when finishing this book, it occurred to me that a fiction book based on facts can be much deeper than non-fiction.  Non-fiction cannot present the psychological dimension.  Anyway, I am in my first book-club ever and this was the assignment and I was pleasantly surprised how much I liked it.

After losing her parents, fifteen-year-old Ivy Hart is left to care for her grandmother; an older sister, age 17 with IQ of less than 70; a nephew, Baby William, age 2; and herself, age 15 with IQ of just above 80, (an IQ rating that becomes significantly suspect) and bouts of epilepsy.  They are tenants on a small tobacco farm.  Ivy struggles with her grandmother’s aging and watching out for her mentally ill sister, Mary Ella.  Mary Ella, the mother of illegitimate Baby William, had a bogus "appendix" operation that was really a sterilization procedure.  Both sisters are unaware of this sterilization and no-one who approved this procedure, including her Grandmother, will tell her. 

 When Jane Forrester takes a position as Grace County’s newest social worker, she doesn’t realize just how much her help is needed.  She quickly becomes emotionally invested in her clients’ lives, causing tension with her boss and her new husband.  But as Jane is drawn in by the Hart women, she begins to discover the secrets of the small farm—secrets much darker than she would have guessed.  Soon, she must decide whether to take drastic action to help them or risk losing the battle against everything she believes is wrong.

My Notes:

Pg. 3: “Ivy and Mary was here”:  this statement carved in the woodwork of a closet summarizes the theme of this book—at least for those that have read the book.

Pg. 15:  Jane, in 1960, just before her wedding, has an examination at her Doctor.  She requests a prescription for birth control pills—the Dr. responds, “I haven’t prescribed the birth control pill yet and I won’t be starting today without getting approval from the man of the house.  Once you’re married, have your husband call me.”

Pg. 50f:  Grounds for sterilization in 1960s North Carolina were: feebleminded (below 70 IQ), epilepsy, or promiscuity.  An alternative is to multiply the woman’s age by her age and then by the number of children she already has—if the result exceeds 120 she can be sterilized.  This was the route that Lita Jordan followed when she voluntarily requested the procedure.  (Her IQ was 115).

Pg. 61:  Ivy: “I always said I couldn’t remember the day Daddy died, but I remembered the feel of it.”

Pg. 337: Author’s Note:  …From 1929 until 1975, North Carolina sterilized over seven thousand of its citizens.  The program targeted the ‘mentally defective,’ the ‘feebleminded,’ inmates in mental institutions and training schools, those suffering from epilepsy, and others whose sterilization was considered ‘for the public good.’  Other states had similar programs but after WWII most of them stopped.  North Carolina, however, actually increased its rate of sterilizations after the war.  The last sterilization in North Carolina was in 1974.

In the early years of the program, the focus was on institutionalized individuals, but in the fifties, it shifted to women on welfare.  Also, North Carolina was the only state to give social workers the power to petition for the sterilization of individuals—in all other states, eugenic sterilization was limited to institutional populations.