What if the coziest story of your childhood was only cozy because someone decided what to leave out?
This week Brett is back for a book club chat on Little House on the Prairie and the real manuscript behind it, Pioneer Girl. We get into how Laura Ingalls Wilder's actual life story got rewritten by her daughter Rose into something sellable for Depression-era kids, what got cut along the way (a dead baby brother, a murdered family friend, an entire year of their lives), and the Osage history the books erase almost entirely, land that was never actually free, a removal that happened right past their door.
We also talk about Pa, who gets remembered as the moral center of the whole series and maybe doesn't deserve it, and about Yesteryear, this year's buzziest book club pick, where a trad-wife influencer wakes up living the 1855 life she's been selling on Instagram.
This is a conversation about which parts of our history get to be cozy and which parts get quietly left out, and who decides. If it resonates, subscribe, leave a review, and send it to a friend who loved these books as a kid too.
Books & Sources Mentioned
Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography
The full Little House series (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
The Rose Years series (Roger Lee MacBride)
The Caroline Years series (Maria D. Wilkes & Celia Wilkins)Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser
Frances Kaye, \"Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve,\" Great Plains Quarterly (2000)
Osage Nation historical documentation (referenced re: 1869–70 removal)
PBS American Masters piece on Laura Ingalls Wilder
Coming Up Next Week!
Author chat with Gaelynn Lea on her memoir It Wasn't Meant to Be Perfect — a folk musician, Broadway composer, and disability advocate on embracing every kind of body.
Thank you!
xx, Alex
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