Leaving Home

Description for LEAVING HOME: A COLLECTION OF LAKE WOBEGON STORIES by Garrison Keillor:

Revisit the beguiling comic world of Lake Wobegon. In the first collection of Lake Wobegon monologues, Keillor tells readers more about some of the people from LAKE WOBEGON DAYS, and about some others, many of whom are leaving home. Among them are Darlene, quitting her job at the Chatterbox Cafe after thirteen years ("Oh honey," her mother said, "why don't you do something with yourself?"); Dale Uecker, Rollie Hochstetter's grandson, who forsakes Carla Krebsbach to join the Navy ("It's a wonderful thing to push on alone toward the horizon and have it be your own horizon and not some else's"); and Father Emil, retiring from Our Lady Of Perpetual Responsibility after forty-four years.

There are some stories here about parents who left: about Val Tollefson's father, David, who fell passionately in love with a neighbor's wife ("Dear Agnes, Something has taken hold of my hears..."), and ran away with her in 1946; and Alex Campbell, who deserted his family in 1948, consigning Grace and her three children to life in a green mobile home dependent on the Church. The perils of taking vacations, of parents coming home to witness (or not quite) the adventures their offspring have indulged in, are here too: the shooting accident in Daryl's parents' bedroom, or the party the Hedlund girls hold when Roger and Cindy take a trip to Gran Rapids.