Love, Sex, and 4-H

Anne-Marie Oomen's memoir is exquisitely written. She conveys the journey of a teenager gaining a sense of self in 1960's rural Michigan with a deftness of touch and an understanding of her former self that takes her work beyond the boundaries of simply 'memoir'. Love, Sex and 4H is destined to become a classic of Midwest rural literature.

~Peter Makin

Seriously, who could take the life of an average adolescent growing up in rural Michigan fraught with sewing projects, virginity, canning, and high school dances, and produce a memoir so intriguing that, despite my attempts to speed read, slowed me into thoughtful contemplation and even brought me to a complete halt now and then as I marveled at these deeply connected sentiments? Oomen can. (Am I allowed to say this is the best memoir I’ve ever read?)

~Kimberly Ann

Anne-Marie's memories call up my own and speak to our female selves; like a best friend, years later, rueful, grateful, piercingly specific. It was like this. Truly, it was.

~Sandra Scofield, Author of Occasions of Sin

Anne-Marie Oomen loves detail, the smaller and more precise the better: the handstitching of an invisible hem, the almost inaudible nighttime sounds of her parents kissing, the jewel colors of jams processed 'the old-fashioned way.' This beautifully observed and wrought book is full of the details of handmade objects and physical labor—a way of life that seems more inaccessible all the time, as our culture daily becomes more virtual.

~Amy Hoffman, Author of Several Memoirs, Including Lies about My Family

Love, Sex, and 4H is a significant contribution to literature about the Midwest, which seems sparse compared to other regions of the country. I've thought long and hard about why that is, and I've come up with a partial answer: In the past hundred years, we've just been too busy WORKING to sit down and write about our lives. Other rural memoirs abound, but few cover life in the upper Midwest, and those that do never focus on the social and sexual awakening of a rural girl with dreams of grandness and a life of purpose and passion.

~Mardi Jo Link, Author of Bootstrapper: from Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm

We are reminded of the American days of bomb shelters and duck-and-cover drills; of learning to sew and learning to kiss. Oomen illuminates the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters, especially between this mother—a woman who lived, as Oomen tells us, a 'life without lace'—and this daughter, the one who writes that in her early teens she understood that she 'did not really want to be good anymore.' And yet, good she is, this daughter, this writer, this Anne-Marie Oomen. And good, too—very good—is Love, Sex, and 4-H.

~Patricia Ann McNair, Author of the Temple of Air