The Truth According to Us

For Willa, books are a way of reaching outside of her own narrow world, experiencing and seeking to make sense of the mysterious world of adults, and seeking to understand the changes that she herself is undergoing.

In Chapter 20, she discovers Jane Eyre—another novel in which the heroine passes from girlhood to adulthood and uncovers a dark secret. Later on in the novel, Willa is particularly drawn to those books that are forbidden to her—Gone With the Wind, Crime and Punishment, The Beautiful and the Damned, and Private Worlds. All these novels in some way reflect her own situation and background. Gone With the Wind presents a strong but flawed heroine engaged in a doomed, passionate relationship against the backdrop of the American Civil War and its fallout. Crime and Punishment, which reflects on the stories people tell themselves to justify appalling actions and the suffering of a man struggling with his conscience, finds many parallels in Felix’s situation. The Beautiful and the Damned perhaps echoes Willa’s fears about her father’s relationship with Layla, a socialite from the big city. Private Worlds describes the struggles of a compassionate and innovative female psychiatrist struggling against the patriarchal establishment, suggesting some parallels with the struggle between Layla’s “alternative” history of Macedonia and the traditionalist, authoritative vision embodied by people like Parker Davies.

The name of the American Everlasting Hosiery Company provides a degree of irony throughout the novel. The epithet “American Everlasting” suggests a high, poetic, and nationalistic ideal that sits rather uncomfortably with the banal necessity of socks. This ironic juxtaposition is dramatized in the opening chapter when Willa recounts that during town pageants, “[s]ometimes the teachers g[i]ve up and kill[] two birds with one stone by making the seventh-graders march across the stage, waving socks, while the eighth-graders s[i]ng ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ behind them” (4). One of the challenges that the FWP undertook was that of defining what it means to be American—the “everlasting” core of American national identity. The factory in Macedonia burns to the ground at one stage and is a political battleground between the emerging trade union movement and the more conservative industrialist classes.