Occasions of Sin

In 1959, when Sandra Scofield was fifteen, she came home to stay in West Texas after years in Catholic boarding schools. She believed her presence would inspire her invalid mother to live. What she found—a fractured family; a distracted, dying mother—nudged her into the tumult of late adolescence and the awakening of her sexuality. More than forty years later, Scofield looks back on her Catholic girlhood and the ways in which her relationship with her mother was grounded in...
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In 1959, when Sandra Scofield was fifteen, she came home to stay in West Texas after years in Catholic boarding schools. She believed her presence would inspire her invalid mother to live. What she found—a fractured family; a distracted, dying mother—nudged her into the tumult of late adolescence and the awakening of her sexuality. More than forty years later, Scofield looks back on her Catholic girlhood and the ways in which her relationship with her mother was grounded in their intertwined aspirations for holiness, achievement, and love. Writing on the brink of old age, she looks back ruefully but without bitterness, forgiving both her mother's frailty and her own.