Here’s my video interview with Andrew Sullivan and Chris Bodenner about life as an outsider in a small town. 

One of the paradoxes, if that’s the right word, that I confront in The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming is how the very same tight social and communal bonds that held me down and back when I was a teenager were the same bonds that held my Louisiana family together when they were going through the terrible crisis of my sister’s cancer. We all like a clean narrative: either small towns are suffocating, narrow-minded hives of conformity, boredom, and failed ambition; or they’re paradises of neighborliness, solidarity, and the simple pleasures of life untainted by the chaos and squalor of the big city.

The truth is they’re both, and neither. I think that most of us, whether we live in a city or a small town, are prone to accept whichever of these narratives most suits our emotional requirements. And that’s not to say that we’re entirely wrong. For a certain kind of person, the faults in a small town do loom especially large; for a certain kind of person, the virtues of a small town define the place. I was the former; my sister was the latter. If we’re honest with ourselves, though, we have to admit that there are virtues and vices in both, and that neither one is perfect. There are unavoidable trade-offs. Perhaps we exaggerate the vices of the option we reject, to make ourselves feel better about the tradeoffs.

As you know, my sister’s death helped me to see our hometown more like she did. The thing is, it wasn’t my sister who did this. It was the people of the town, in reacting to my sister’s cancer. True, she inspired them to act this way, but as I note in Little Way, they did this sort of thing for Robert Edward Daniel, when he was struck with leukemia in his 20s, and they’re doing it right now for a young family man named Jamie Navarre, also suffering from Stage IV cancer. This is how the people of West Feliciana Parish are. I got to see it from far away because Ruthie’s cancer called forth their extraordinary charity and communal love onto my family, and in so doing, forced me to reconsider the trade-offs I had made so long ago.

If you’ve read my 2006 book Crunchy Cons, you will know that I’ve long lamented the loss of community and community spirit in American life, and the role that the refusal of limits, and the insistence of autonomy and liberty, has played in depleting us, individually and communally. Still, I didn’t confront, or have to confront, the price of my own choice to turn my back on my hometown … until Ruthie got sick.

I have to underscore that the message of Little Way isn’t that everybody should return to their hometowns. For many, maybe most, people, their hometowns are big cities. For others, whose families are broken or dysfunctional, or who come from places where there’s no work, there’s nothing to go home to. I met a Louisiana expat at one of my signings the other day who said it’s great that I was able to go back to a great town and parish, but that her town is economically moribund, and people with educations are moving out because there’s no work. That’s a reality that no amount of wishful thinking and good intentions can change.

And yet, I think it’s true that many of us conceal from ourselves the fact that we have considerably more freedom of choice than we think we do. Sam M. says this all the time in these threads: If you really wanted to be home, you could take a lesser job. Yes, you could. But maybe you have a vocation, a calling, that you can’t fulfill at home. At the end of Little Way, my father makes a shocking confession about a calling that he sacrificed for the sake of family and place, and is now wondering if it was worth it. This, at the very end of his life. You can’t read Little Way and conclude that the answers are simple or obvious. They aren’t for me, and they aren’t for anybody, at least not anyone who is honest. I do hope, though, that Little Way will provoke readers to reconsider what they left behind when they left home (or what they affirmed by staying), and to think hard about the trade-offs they made, and if those trade-offs are worth it today.

Ruthie’s suffering, and, more specifically, the response of the people of this small place to her suffering, forced me out of my comfort zone, and made me understand how my own sense of values and priorities had changed. In turn, it made me change my life. But if we had, for whatever reason or reasons, not moved to West Feliciana, I think it would have caused me to change my life in other ways — in particular, to get more involved actively in community, and serving others, instead of simply writing and thinking about it.

I am happy, though, to see that in the nearly 30 years I was away from St. Francisville, it has become significantly easier to be an outsider there. And I am pleased to see that I have changed too, and have clearer vision about what matters in life, and my own limitations, and what that beautiful town has to offer me and my children. Maybe Ruthie’s story — which is really the story of a people and a place — will help you think through this stuff in your own life.