Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR's Polio Haven

Abbott Combes

Shreve is a novelist who has approached her story with a reporter's eye. She has done her research on polio and Warm Springs, weaving the history of this once-dread disease unobtrusively into her own. But it is the due diligence she has done on her own young self—re-examining the girl she was from the perspective of the woman she has become ("the truth of this story is in the way I see it now") and fitting that girl back into a time and a place a half-century gone—that distinguishes Warm Springs from so many of the vertical-pronoun bores arriving at bookstores these days.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Novelist Shreve recollects her years spent from ages 11 to 13 at Warm Springs Polio Foundation in Georgia: "Traces are little whispers of life in muscles destroyed by the polio virus." The traces of this eloquently written memoir, however, are not merely physical; they are the whispers of the time, brief glimpses into the social climate of the 1950s, into the religious longing of a lonely young girl hoping for a connection, into the mindset of the president who led the country despite a debilitating handicap. While the events take place as Shreve recovers from surgeries that would allow her to walk better, polio becomes a minor character; her friendships with the others in the facility, her innocent romance with a fellow patient and her growing attraction to the priest take center stage as she tries to make herself into a "good" girl: "I remember reading once," she writes, "about the strange attractor, a star that unsettles planetary balance, which was the role I seemed to play in our family life." The writing of this beautifully told story is delicate and precise, even as she calls into question her own memories: "we lived in a kind of maze, a finely spun fairy tale created by my parents in which some things were clear and some were fuzzy.... I assumed that what I saw was true. I didn't realize until I was older that seeing is a matter of choice." (June)

Kirkus Reviews

Memoir of life at Roosevelt's Warm Springs polio center, where the author stayed between the ages of 11 and 13. Novelist Shreve (A Student of Living Things, 2006, etc.) draws on an unpublished novel, written when she was 18, to refresh her memory of life at that time. Her initial stay was from August to December 1950, with a second and longer stay from June 1951 to April 1952. During both stays, surgery is performed on her right leg and she undergoes months of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation for her is not simply a physical act; she believes that at Warm Springs she will transform herself from a bad girl who had caused her family trouble into a virtual angel of God. Less severely handicapped than most of the other children-her roommate is in a body cast-the lonely young Shreve is embarrassed by her relative wholeness and feels very much the outsider. She tries to fill her days with catechism lessons from a friendly priest, reading books and becoming a sort of caretaker, visiting the babies' ward every day, delivering mail and carrying bedpans. She writes falsely cheery letters to her mother, to which her mother offers upbeat replies, neither one acknowledging true feelings and the reality of the situation. Her special friend is a half-paralyzed boy, Joey, who dreams of becoming an athlete and whom Shreve recklessly leads into a terrible accident, the story of which begins and ends this memoir. Having tried to become the epitome of goodness, she commits a reckless act that confirms her badness and swiftly brings about her departure, if not expulsion, from Warm Springs. More than a revealing picture of FDR's polio treatment center in the years just before the arrival of vaccines that ended afrightening, crippling disease, this is a moving portrait of a girl on the cusp of adolescence dealing with pain, guilt and loneliness.