Marian Fenmore

Marian Fenmore writes for people who still want something worth reading and would rather not squint at it.

Her books start from one conviction: that the things everybody half remembers are usually more interesting than the version that gets passed around, and that a reader is entitled to know where a fact came from.

Short Stories for Seniors tells thirty true stories behind ordinary objects. The pop up toaster. The spring that walked downstairs. The machine that folds the bottom of a paper grocery bag. All one hundred and eighty eight sources are named at the back, story by story, and because they are not all of equal weight the list says which is which. Where the famous version turns out to be wrong, the book says so plainly and shows what actually happened instead.

The same standard runs through the puzzle books. Large Print Trivia for Seniors checks every question against a period source, from postal rate tables to museum collections and patent filings, and cuts anything two reliable sources disagree about. Ten facts were checked for that book and then dropped for exactly that reason, and the book prints them.

Large Print Word Search for Seniors sets a hundred themed puzzles of the 1950s, 60s and 70s in extra large letters, with a short period note under each one.

Not everything she writes is a matter of record, and the books say which is which. Short Stories for Seniors to Read Aloud is fiction: forty invented stories of ordinary American life in the 1950s and 60s, each about four minutes read out loud, each followed by three questions to talk about afterwards. Remember With Me is not a book to read but one to ask from, three hundred gentle prompts for talking with somebody about a life they have already lived.

The print editions are set in large type, on paper chosen so that nothing shows through from the other side, in short pieces meant for a single sitting. There is no order to follow and nothing earlier to remember. Open one anywhere.