THE BENIGN SKEPTIC

In this debut memoir, retired English educator Taylor recounts a long and troubled life and the lessons that she learned along the way.

The author was born in 1939, the youngest of three siblings and the only one who was unplanned—a “mixed blessing,” she says, in a household that was always in a state of financial arrears. Her parents often feuded over their mounting debts, and when Taylor was 8 years old, they divorced. Her mother, Polly, married a strange man named Marvin who forced them to travel constantly, which often led to their living out of cheap motels. He beat the author regularly, she says, and made them all eat cat meat that he claimed was rabbit; he also compelled them to alter their names and appearances to avoid people whom he thought were pursuing him. Marvin finally abandoned them when Polly’s money ran out, and the author and her mother moved in with her grandfather for a year, which she calls the “black hole of my life.” The remainder of Taylor’s meticulous memoir, however, is less dramatic. Her first marriage ended in divorce, but it also gave her four children whom she adored. She went on to earn a doctorate in anthropology before meeting Bill Hall, with whom she says she enjoyed the “first truly satisfactory love affair of my life.” She was struck by how similar their temperaments and worldviews were; they were both “family oriented, moderate Democrats” and “benign skeptics”—her own term, which gives her book its title: “A benign skeptic differs from either an agnostic or an atheist,” she asserts. “Unlike an agnostic, he knows what he believes and disbelieves; and unlike an atheist, he has no axe to grind with believers.”

Taylor’s highly detailed remembrance is conveyed in an informal, anecdotal style that achieves something close to an easy intimacy with the reader. Her success against considerable odds is undeniably impressive, as is the cheerful resilience with which she repeatedly faced misfortune. After her second husband died in 2018, the author maintained her irrepressible embrace of life and rejoined the dating scene in her 70s. She announces at the beginning of the book that her true audience is her six grandchildren: “I want them to know who I am. Not just the fact that I lived and produced offspring, which is all I know about my own great-grandmothers, but to really know me.” Indeed, the entire book seems intended for their eyes only, as it’s idiosyncratically personal and spangled with family photographs throughout. Taylor also often shares her sensible, if familiar, wisdom, as when she counsels her audience that “life really isn’t fair” and that one should “honestly seek the truth”; at another point, she shares a recipe for Irish Wake Punch. However, as charming as Taylor’s recollections are over the course of this remembrance, they are likely to be enjoyed most by those to whom they were specifically intended.

A thoughtful autobiography, but one that may be too narrowly personal to gain a wide readership.