FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

A young mother struggles to care for her special-needs child in this debut Christian memoir.

Guinn was delighted when she found out she was pregnant at the age of 22, even though she was unmarried—it was the early 1970s, when there were still strong taboos against single motherhood, especially in conservative Kansas City. The author had already been divorced once, and she didn’t relish the thought of tying herself to her baby’s father, the underemployed and hard-drinking Tony. Even so, she married him, and she gave birth to her daughter, Jenny, not long after. The short marriage was riddled with fights, threats, and even a kidnapping; eventually, Guinn found herself divorced, raising Jenny alone in Wichita and working at Cessna. Then she got a disturbing diagnosis from Jenny’s doctor: The baby had severe brain damage. “I think she’s blind,” the doctor told the horrified Guinn, “and she’ll probably never walk and never talk, and I think you should put her in an institution.” The author chafed at his advice, vowing to care for her daughter to the best of her ability, even if it meant taking on a second job as a cocktail waitress to pay for the illness-prone girl’s medical bills. She did the best she could until a catastrophe struck that nearly destroyed her. In the aftermath, Guinn turned to a place she’d rarely sought comfort from in the past: God. Guinn is a skilled dramatist of her own character, unafraid to portray herself in a bad or selfish light. She also writes with a novelistic attention to detail; here, she describes her office at the Cessna factory: “The room smelled of typewriter ribbon, fresh paper, and cigarette smoke that hovered around the ashtray on my desk. The office sounded of tapping on typewriter keys, clicking on adding machines, and an occasional bing on the window next to me when some guy on the assembly line below threw a rivet at the window beside my desk.” The result is a substantial and nuanced chronicle of perseverance.

A rich, complicated account of surviving life’s trials.