Book Review: Love Can Build a Bridge

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: Love Can Build a Bridge


Author: Naomi Judd

Author's web page: http://www.naomijudd.com/

Date: 1993

Publisher: Fawcett Crest / Ballantine

ISBN: 0-449-22274-8

Length: 530 pages of text

Illustrations: 30 pages of black and white photos

Quote: "I grew up in the northeast corner of the Bluegrass State along the Ohio - West Virginia border, just a stone's throw from the coal mining towns of West Virginia, near the fertile horse country of central Kentucky in the lush Ohio Valley..."

If you want to know how wide the gap between the socioeconomic classes in the United States is, read Love Can Build a Bridge in the same year you read Loretta Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter. The two women were born, and lived, in almost the same places at almost the same time, and they seem to be writing about life on two different planets.

Both of them, being from eastern Kentucky, inevitably describe themselves as "Appalachian." Kentucky does not have a town called Appalachia, so Kentuckians can get away with this carelessness. Let's just say that Naomi Judd's style and memories are much more like the women of that age I know in the Appalachian Mountains than Loretta Lynn's are. I'm not proud of it, but I had to get close to the age Naomi Judd was when she wrote Love Can Build a Bridge before I exposed myself to any awareness that anything in Coal Miner's Daughter could possibly have been true.

In this book, Naomi Judd presents herself as a believable (or do I mean "middle-class"?) mountain woman. She visited nineteenth-century houses that had not been "modernized" by 1950, and was able to appreciate the old houses and the people who lived in them while still feeling a need to go back to her own house, with the running water and all, to feel "clean." She "had to" marry young, but with a very clear sense that she had fallen below the community standard, not that being a pregnant teenaged bride was normal. Her premature marriage didn't last, but she describes herself as bored and discontented rather than abused. She went to college, if only after her divorce, and never tried to fake illiteracy on stage. In fact, she mentions the way several books and medical studies influenced her life. She loves her home more because she's travelled. And although she's aware that coal mines, and welfare cheating, and moonshine liquor, and other components of the stereotype Loretta Lynn exploited, existed in Kentucky she doesn't mention any personal knowledge of or interest in those things.

She's not averse to cliches, and apparently no editor ever suggested to her that some readers might have preferred "Ashland, Kentucky" to the 67 words of what sound like a realtor's brochure quoted above. But this is authentic. Country music fans have no problem with cliches as long as there is truth in them.

Real country music fans were, of course, familiar with the story before Love Can Build a Bridge came out. Single mother sings duets with her daughter the singer; thanks to luck, hard work, and talent, they achieve spectacular success; then mother's health fails. The medical details of Naomi Judd's liver disease, including the role elective surgery may have played in it, are discussed at length, with a clear intention to help others by sharing information. Apart from these gross-outs, it's a nice clean story. Women can leave it on the coffee table without worrying that they'd be embarrassed if their children or grandchildren read it.

Confessions in this book lean toward the "what our original names were and how we chose our stage names" variety. Celebrity gossip is limited to the "We went onstage just after them, so we talked to them backstage and thought they were nice" sort of thing. There's a great deal of music trivia, memories of when The Judds first sang a song and when it became a bestseller. There are quotes from some of Naomi Judd's original lyrics--not complete lyrics--and discussions of when and why she wrote them. There are brief discussions of her religious beliefs; I find these sections unobtrusive and non-judgmental, but I'm a Protestant too. There's not much sex, not much about drugs, and only one anecdote about violent insanity.

There is plenty of place nostalgia, too. I can't say that when I picked up this book I'd been looking for reminiscences about radio station KNEW, or Berea College, or any number of other places where both Naomi Judd and I have been, but I admit to being the sort of reader who always likes to read other people's memories of places where I've been.

And there's the mother-daughter business. I don't know whether the heavily edited, one-sided view of The Judds' relationship given in this book will help any readers resolve ongoing parent-child issues, but my guess would be that reading about this stage mother and diva daughter should help most women appreciate the mothers and daughters they have.
 
How will reading this book, and/or other books by Naomi Judd, affect your experience of viewing The Judds' reality TV show? I don't watch much TV, so I have no idea.
 
Anyway, Naomi Judd is definitely a living author, so if you click here to buy (any of her) book(s) from me, I'll send her a 10% royalty. ($10-15, depending on what's available at Amazon at the time, includes shipping.) If anybody out there has Microsoft Outlook, please send her a link to this page.