I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly Book

In the introduction to I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly, the first (and only) collection by the late Mary Ladd Gavell, who died in 1967, the author's son calls her "something of an early feminist". And indeed, the women she writes about do share certain feelings of emptiness and longing, whether they're elicited by inattentive husbands, the empty-nest syndrome or postpartum depression. In "The Infant," for example, Gavell's protagonist, Margaret, feels little of the conventional adoration a mother is supposed to feel for her newborn child: She looked at the little gnomelike figure in her lap, and she thought, I suppose he'll be cute when he's two, and we shall be terribly proud of him and wouldn't be able to imagine life without him, but all I can think of now is that I wish we hadn't had him. So much for maternal warmth. Yet the author guides us so nonchalantly through Margaret's state of mind that it becomes impossible to judge her. Elsewhere, Gavell is similarly revealing about the complexities of women, the hardships they endure, and the possibilities they have the potential to encounter. Yet she seldom takes a rigidly feminist stance: she's more concerned with the psychological labyrinths of the human mind. It's a shame that these beautifully written stories--of which only one, "The Rotifer", has been published before--will constitute Gavell's entire literary legacy. But then this is all the more reason to read and cherish them. --Yvonne Schindler, Amazon.comRead More