A Lettered Life

Lillian Bedford was raised in cotton fields and coal dust. She left Georgia with a locket, a steamer trunk, a head full of Clara Bow, and dreams of writing. Lillian never meant to be heroic. She just wanted to be a novelist. She didn’t expect to borrow sugar or to fear her mother. Unfortunately, the Great Depression dispenses humiliations and handouts in equal measure. Amid the hunger and the hard times, she discovered kindness in unlikely places—an old trunk of letters, a stubborn friend who furnishes the type of friendship that carries a person through a night they didn’t think they’d survive. A Lettered Life is Lillian’s ledger of small resistances. Her weapon is a 1930 Royal portable typewriter. Rod McFain masterfully textures a novel with a gentle, lived-in heart while weaving a tale of a young woman of quiet stubbornness and moral backbone. It is about being fiercely independent, occasionally foolish, and sometimes brave enough to tell the truth—it’s about whether a girl with dreams can make a life worth owning.