Mary Todd Lincoln, You Saucy Minx

So, in my recent thirst for reality I bought a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln. I was walking down the street, avoiding being in my apartment while the landlord showed it to potential renters, when I passed by Borders. Though Borders is way overpriceded and books are apparantly free down at this store called "Lib-Rary". I searched the racks of new and old fiction and though usually I'm like a kid in a candy store, I felt numb and uninterested in imaginary worlds full of imaginary people. I wanted to know about someone real. I wanted to hear about what someone really did while they were living here. What they decided to do with this world and with their life, in their time. I didn't want it to be someone I already knew everything about like Lucille Ball, I didn't want it to be someone really glamorous ad trendy like Jackie O, I didn't want it to be a celebrity with millions of dollars or someone really creative like an author or painter. I wasn't in the mood to hear anyone's lengthy verbal diarrhea about their inspiration and motivation. No, I wanted a shrew. Someone plain. Someone stuck in their own life. Someone sad but proud. Someone despised but not evil. Not a killer, but a nag. Someone in an uhappy but fortunate marriage. Someone abandoned in her own time and in ours. Abandoned by history. Someone who experienced real solid living breathing pain and sorrow but kept on going until their time was up. Someone crazier than a shit house rat. I found that someone in my new friend Mary Todd Lincoln.
Bitch is nuts. However, reading her biography is like reading a psychology text book. All the pieces connect, everything makes sense. Her desperate need to be heard and seen after being left behind in so many ways throughout her life. Watching her husband and her status as someone particular die in her arms. Watching her sons die. Leaving the country to go be nothing in France. After years of telling Honest Abe to "Remember Yourself, Mr. Lincoln" due to his country manners she was known to mutter in her last few years, "I wish I could forget myself."
The straighforwardness and lack of beauty and imagery in this book is stunning. The history through actual people rather than dates and locations. Knowing that I was reading a piece of history without the fear of a pop quiz in my future. This book has made me angry at high school history teachers. History is fascinating but is always presented so sleepily. When I went to college I took a class called "History of the 60's" and was blown away. I remember being upset that I hadn't minored in history and calling my mom to ask her everything she could reember about that decade. It's not that this book is so amazingly well written, it's that sometimes you can find a person from so long ago and just...find them. I mean, connect with them and get them. But there they are during the civil war instead of the Iraq war, living in a masion in Kentucky instead of a studio in Chicago. And for all the times she may have quietly shut the door to her room, saying she needed to rest, and put her head in her hands and said, "No one cares", I can reach back in time by reading about her, through wars and technology and good presidents and terrible presidents and I can put my arm around her shoulders and say, "I do...I care Mary Todd Lincoln."