The memoir Helen Dragunas began and her daughter Deanna Bennett finished, and the true ending to the Anna story. A tribute and a review.
Helen Dragunas started writing her life story and died before she finished it. Her daughter picked it up and completed it. That daughter was Deanna Bennett, who founded the East Lake Writers’ Workshop in Palm Harbor and ran the table I sat at for years, and the book they made together is Anna’s Daughter.
If you’ve read Deanna’s Anna Immigration Trilogy, you already know Helen’s mother. Anna was real. She crossed from Lithuania at fifteen in 1914, and her granddaughter turned that crossing into three novels. Anna’s Daughter is the nonfiction follow-on, and it tells readers what happened to the real Anna after she married the handsome man of her dreams.
What is Anna’s Daughter about?
It’s Helen’s life. As the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, she describes daily life in the 1920s and what the Great Depression did to her family in the 1930s. She tells stories of growing up, of first meeting the man she’d marry, and of the travels, triumphs and tragedies that followed.
Her personality comes through: determination, self-confidence, a good heart and a sense of humor. The book calls itself a tribute to all immigrants and their children who climbed from poverty to a comfortable American life through hard work and stubbornness. That’s three generations in one family: the girl in steerage, the daughter in the Depression, and the granddaughter who wrote it all down.
In memory
Remembering Deanna Bennett: the founder of the East Lake Writers’ Workshop, the woman at the head of the table, and the writer behind the Anna books.
Can you finish a memoir after the person who started it has died?
Yes, and Anna’s Daughter proves it. Helen left pages behind. Deanna had the research skills from the trilogy and a lifetime of her mother’s stories in her head, and she carried the book the rest of the way. The book lists both of them as authors. Good.
I’ve written memoirs from a deceased subject’s papers myself, interviewing siblings and family to fill in what the pages don’t say. It works. What doesn’t work is leaving the pages in a drawer. Every family has a Helen, somebody who started writing it down and ran out of time, and a half-finished manuscript is a gift waiting for somebody to finish it.
Keep reading
Can a ghostwriter finish my late parent’s memoir?: how a book gets completed from journals and recordings after the person who started it is gone.
Should you read the Anna Immigration Trilogy before Anna’s Daughter?
You’ll get more out of it if you do. The trilogy, Anna: Going to America, Anna: American Journey and Anna: American Dream, is fact-based fiction about Anna’s first five years in America. Anna’s Daughter is nonfiction and stands on its own, but the moment you learn what became of the real Anna lands harder after three books with the fictional one. Anna’s Daughter is available on Amazon.
Deanna published this in 2022, the year before she died. She finished her mother’s book. It’s hard to think of a better last word for a writer.
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