Arnold, “Oops! Confessions of a Klutz” (reviewed by Marilyn Brown)

Review
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Title: Oops! Confessions of a Klutz
Author: Marilyn Arnold
Publisher: Mayhaven, Mohamet, IL
Genre: Personal Essays
Year Published; 2014
Number of Pages: 221
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 12: 978 1939695116
ISBN: 10: 1939695112
Price: $16.95

Reviewed by Marilyn Brown for the Association for Mormon Letters

Voila! This book is the result of a LIFE in capital letters!

I had the memorable privilege of witnessing this cheerful work percolate in Marilyn Arnold’s fertile brain. Over Thai food (my favorite), she adamantly announced there would not be another book. But I said, “What about your hikes, your tennis, your broken bones?”

Marilyn Arnold is one of those rare writers who knows how to turn a phrase, to link specifics so humorously it brings tears to your eyes. I was so impressed with her klutziness I enlisted the attention of my husband (the cook in the family) to hear about Marilyn’s escapades in the kitchen. “You folks out there who have never been subjected to my cooking don’t know how lucky you are.” It’s a blessing for us that her mother encouraged her: “You have other gifts, dear.”

Her mother was certainly right. Winner of the coveted Mayhaven fiction award and author of five other nationally published books, as well as author of many sensitive hymns and scholarly studies about the Book of Mormon, Marilyn has gifts, all right. Accompanied by Mr. Mayes’s hilarious drawings of a tall skinny cartoon adventuress sporting cast and crutch while climbing a sheer cliff, or rowing a rubber raft (she almost lost her life), this is writing at its best–about a devotee who tried everything and is still at it in her seventies.

When her father told her early on that “football was not a ladylike sport” and she was to “cease and desist at once,” she replied, “I like football more than being ladylike.” But Father Arnold was not impressed. She may not have won the football argument, but she tried everything else: baseball, golf, swimming, skiing, and on and on. The caption at the end–a quote by Samuel Ullman–is meaningful. “Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”

This is a fun read by our enthusiastic Marilyn Arnold, who has always made us smile, or urged us to think as we read her profound scriptural studies. She is an example of a well-informed scholar who understands the world’s arguments, but champions the truth. She concludes by referring to a statement from the nationally loved Southern writer Flannery O’Connor: “I am a woman of deep and abiding faith.”