My Year with Eleanor Read Online Free Page A

your time to the best advantage if you do not make some sort of plan,” Eleanor wrote. But she cautioned, “I find that life is much more satisfactory when it forms some kind of pattern, though I do not believe in too rigid a pattern .”
    She’s telling me not to go overboard, I thought. If you make this plan too rigid, then you’re leaving no room for spontaneity, for facing the small, everyday things that come up unexpectedly. If I planned everything out, I wouldn’t be facing all my fears, because in the last few years, I’d developed an aversion to spontaneity. I returned to my document and added one more line to the bottom of the list: “Fear of the unknown and unplanned.”
    Satisfied that I finally had, if not a plan exactly, at least a direction for my immediate future, I changed the document name to “My Year of Fear” and urged the cursor to the top of the screen. I clicked with more confidence than I’d had in months. A short message appeared across the screen: saved.

Chapter Two
    Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can only grow as long as we are interested.
    â€”ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
    I felt hopeful for the first time in months. I also had a birthday to plan. A few days after making the list, I was stretched out on the couch reading an Eleanor book, but my mind kept drifting to my upcoming twenty-ninth birthday. Because Matt would be at work in Albany, he was taking me out to a nice dinner the next weekend. So it would just be me and my few remaining close friends. This still left the question of the celebration. Since my birthday was the first official day of my Year of Fear, I wanted to combine the party with the scary activity. But what?
    Part of me had hoped Eleanor might inspire some ideas, but there was no mention of birthdays as I thumbed through her biographies. Instead I found myself sucked in to the drama of her privileged but joyless childhood. Her parents’ marriage was strained. Elliott drank heavily. When Eleanor was five, he caused a bit of a scandal when he fathered a child with one of the servants, who hired an attorney and threatened a $10,000 lawsuit. When Eleanor was eight, her twenty-nine-year-old mother died of diphtheria. Elliott was in a mental institution trying to overcome alcoholism, so Eleanor and her two brothers moved into their surly grandmother’s Manhattan brownstone. Five months later, her brother Elliott Jr. also died of diphtheria. Elliott and Eleanor mostly kept in touch via letters; one day the letters stopped coming. Less than two years after her mother’s death, Eleanor’s father jumped out of a window and killed himself. She and her little brother remained with Grandmother Hall and her four boisterous adult children who still lived at home. Her eccentric aunts—Maude and the unfortunately named Pussie—and her playboy uncles, Vallie and Eddie, were known for their wild shenanigans and love affairs. One day while the group was vacationing at their summer home, Vallie and Eddie parked themselves at an upstairs window with a gun and took turns firing at family members sitting on the lawn. Grandmother Hall pronounced the household too rowdy for a girl of fifteen and sent Eleanor to the Allenswood Academy, a finishing school for girls just outside London.
    The headmistress at Allenswood was a silver-haired woman named Madame Souvestre who was not to be trifled with. She was French and required the students to speak French at all times. She demanded independent thinking from her pupils. Students who turned in papers that merely summarized her lessons found their work literally torn to shreds in front of the class, the pieces thrown to the floor.
    â€œWhy was your mind given you, but to think things out for yourself!” Madame Souvestre cried.
    I paused in my reading, trying to imagine my life at