Laura Flynn

Yesterday, I went to see Laura Flynn at Rhodes College. When she introduced it was mentioned that she spent a lot of time in Haiti and that all of her friends were surprised that she did not write about her experiences there. Instead she wrote a book about her mother’s mental illness. When Laura Flynn came up to speak she said that she was going to read a chapter out of her book that gave a pretty good overlook at what it was about. She gave a little information on the book before she read so that the audience there could understand where in the book she was coming from. She said that at the part of the chapter she was reading that her family lived in San Francisco and that her family was still together. When Laura started to read the chapter, she read about how her mother would sit in chair in the midst of a cluttered room. The part that I liked most about the chapter was that she wrote how her mother was observing a humming bird outside of the window, then she continued to read about her mother’s thought process in that chair. After, she finished reading that portion of the chapter, it ended with as she looked at the humming bird. I really like the strategy she used with the humming bird; because she explained so much information about her mother but all of that thought process took place while watching a humming bird for a few minutes. Some of the sentences she wrote were very pretty, for example (this sentence isn’t verbatim) “she would look at the trees, to the branches, and then to the needles.” I really liked this sentence, because she gave really great detail, and broke down what her mother was thinking.