The Autobiography of Mary Frances Earp

Though this is a metafiction, the Autobiography is factual in detail, following closely the life of its subject, a farm woman born in Iowa in 1862 who bore and reared 11 children, homesteaded with her husband William Earp in Nebraska and Oklahoma, and died in Oklahoma in 1961 at the age of 98. A woman of deep piety, she belonged first to the United Brethren and then to the Church of God. She blames herself for sinful pride in that she kept one of her grandsons and reared him herself instead of allowing his biological father and his step-mother to rear him. She believes this sin cast a long shadow on her life and the grandson's. Now, sixty years after her death, she finds herself to be a photon of light in the Goldilocks Zone, which is not what she expected after death. She wonders if it may not be a kind of purgatory that she has to suffer for her sin. Perhaps the act of writing her life story may be a form of atonement.