Excerpt
SUMMARY: George Hodgman left a fast-paced life as an editor in Manhattan for small town Missouri to care for his elderly mother. Judy Woodruff sits down with Hodgman to discuss his poignant memoir of caretaking, “Bettyville.”
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): It is a memoir of a son and his mother at the twilight of her life, the son who returns from the fast track Manhattan life to the small town of Paris, Missouri. It’s about loss, but also about discovery. It’s about struggle and courage, but ultimately it’s about love.
The it is “Bettyville” by George Hodgman, a former magazine and book editor at Simon & Schuster and Vanity Fair and Talk magazine.
George Hodgman, welcome to the program.
GEORGE HODGMAN, Author, “Bettyville”: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: You spent years as an editor, but you had never written a book until this one. Did that make it easier or harder?
GEORGE HODGMAN: I think that I always, always wanted to write a book, and I had been carrying around little slivers.
And this emotional moment just had to allowed me to access everything. And the editing, I learned a lot about what I should have been doing as an editor all these years when I became a writer.
JUDY WOODRUFF: I want you to fold that in to coming home to Missouri, a place you left, maybe thinking you would never go back.
GEORGE HODGMAN: I am surprised to find myself back, but I also am surprisingly happy there.
I had lived on my own and for myself in a lot of ways, and it’s nice to be in a different kind of community for a little while. I have been around hard-driving, ambitious, kind of self-centered people. And I’m enjoying a completely different kind of life.
I mean, it’s interesting, because my East Coast friends are — were so determined to get me back. And they had such negative attitudes about this part of the country and, you know, religious fanatics and right-wingers and everything. And it was a good lesson in learning that the stereotypes that I had sort of acquired were not always so accurate.
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