1960

The novel’s 1960 starting point becomes the first marker in a life story that is ultimately told through accumulated records rather than dates alone. As Tully and Kate move through childhood, work, separation, and illness, scrapbooks, letters, a wartime message, dreams, and journal writing turn remembered time into a record of attachment, ambition, and family.

The First Date in a Scrapbook

On her eleventh birthday, after her grandmother leaves, Tully faces the blank first page of a new scrapbook. She imagines it as a gift for her absent mother: a way to show what the mother had missed and, perhaps, to earn her pride. Tully has few photographs of herself and only one picture of her mother. She writes the date in the upper corner and begins a letter, making the year a concrete beginning for a record addressed to someone who is not there.

That first entry grows into a practice. Tully saves school and sports photographs, ticket stubs, receipts, and other traces of ordinary days, writing about good moments and attaching evidence of where she has been. She receives a new scrapbook each birthday and fills one after another. The books preserve events, but they also reveal the emotional purpose behind the archive: Tully hopes her mother will someday see the record and be proud. In time, Tully embellishes parts of her account, not by inventing an entirely different life but by making it look better for the imagined reader.

A Dream Takes Shape

The year 1960 also anchors the life story Kate later begins to write for her children. Looking back, Kate locates its beginning in a small northern farming town and a clapboard house above a horse pasture, then identifies 1974 as the moment when the story changes: the girl who will become her closest friend moves across the street. The contrast between these dates gives the account a shape—an origin followed by the arrival of a relationship that will define what comes after.

For Tully, a different future first becomes imaginable in the Mularkey home. Watching the news, she hears Mrs. Mularkey praise Jean Enersen as one of the first women to anchor a nightly news program. Tully abruptly declares that she will be a reporter. The ambition gives direction to a life marked by maternal absence, and it becomes her private mantra: the hope of becoming the next Jean Enersen turns a painful past into something she can move beyond and toward.

That aspiration follows Tully into the University of Washington. She prepares for network reporting by taking communications courses, reading at least four newspapers each day, and watching newscasts. Yet the institution imposes a limit she cannot talk her way around: because she is young, she cannot take upper-level broadcasting or journalism classes until her turn comes. The delay sharpens the contrast between her urgency and the pace of formal training. By the end of her sophomore year, she has taken Chad Wiley’s two broadcast journalism classes and done everything he asks, still waiting for him to recognize her ability and recommend her for KVTS.

Letters as a Lifeline

When Tully and Kate are separated, 1970s time is measured not only by school years but by a repeated Sunday ritual. For three years they write faithfully to each other. Tully sits at the white desk in her lavender-and-pink bedroom and sends Kate her thoughts, worries, and dreams. Some letters record the everyday details of adolescence; others reveal how deeply Tully longs for her mother to return and say she is proud. When Tully’s grandfather dies, Kate is the person she turns to. In her letters to Kate, Tully is more nearly herself than in the carefully improved version of her life preserved in the scrapbooks.

The letters make separation bearable while also keeping a shared future alive. In 1977, with the two friends attending separate schools and approaching their senior year, Tully knows that Kate shares her dream of reporting. The imagined partnership gives the career goal a second dimension: becoming a reporter is not only an individual ambition but a future they expect to pursue together.

Work, War, and the Long Present

Later records show how far the early ambition carries Tully—and how demanding its fulfillment becomes. After moving to New York, she wakes at 3:30 each morning for work. Success at CBS adds afternoon meetings to her broadcasts, while documentary narration, guest-hosting, television appearances, and public engagements fill out a schedule she keeps accepting. The 1960 beginning thus stands at the far end of a life in which the dream has become a career, but achievement brings longer days and a growing fear of losing what she has gained.

A message from Johnny Ryan to Kate, written from Baghdad during the war, places another kind of time inside the story: the uncertain wait of people separated by events they cannot control. He writes that journalists are staying at the Al-Rashid Hotel, that the coverage may change everything, and that the group is about to leave the city for the first time. His promise to be careful sits beside Kate’s fear and longing. The message preserves the immediate uncertainty of that moment rather than smoothing it into a later account of what happened.

Memory Rewritten for the Next Generation

As Kate faces the end of her life, she opens her journal without a clear plan and begins with the fear she experiences in the present. She connects that fear to her family: to Johnny’s sadness, to Marah’s acceptance, and to the conflicts between mother and daughter that Kate now understands as part of their struggle to love one another while separating. She then turns from present reflection to a story meant for Marah, one that begins in 1960 and becomes especially important in 1974. The dates organize the account, but the purpose is to tell her daughter who they have been to each other.

Kate’s final reflections make that purpose explicit. Writing her life, she discovers, is not ultimately a matter of fixing dates, names, successes, and failures in order. What she wants her children to remember is love, family, and laughter—and how proud she is of them and of herself. The novel’s 1960 beginning therefore does more than establish chronology: it becomes the point from which a life can be retold, while its meaning rests in the bonds that the records were created to keep.