Taos: A Memory Book

In the summer of 1929 twenty-three-year-old Miriam Hapgood, who had never been west of New York, came to Taos, New Mexico, to visit Mabel Dodge Luhan. Miriam's parents, Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce, both well-known writers at the time, were old friends of Mabel's. They had sent Miriam to Taos in the hope that it would cure the depression that had plagued her for two years. Miriam responded immediately to this magical place. She spent the summer with Mabel, stayed on into fall, and then persuaded her father to buy her a small house in Taos. In this posthumously published memoir she describes that summer and the next twelve years of her life, during which she married, became a mother, and saw the unraveling of her marriage. Her beautifully told story with its fascinating glimpses of Mabel Dodge Luhan and her circle of artist and celebrity friends - among the people Miriam met in Taos were Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, and Leopold Stokowski - is a moving account of a young woman's coming of age and shaping an identity of her own quite different from that of her remarkable parents. Her book is valuable both for the light it sheds on the famous and for its illumination of the lives of women in general.