The Globe and Mail
"... thanks to the honesty and dancing energy of her writing, the account that emerges of the daily life of a fifties housewife in small-town Ontario manages to be funny, touching and, most surprising of all, totally compelling."

Veronica Strong-Boag, University of British Columbia, The Canadian Historical Review
"Access to this type of normally private commentary is an inestimable boon to the social historian. The physical, intellectual, and emotional work of making a life for oneself, one's family, and one's community are movingly laid out in details that few public documents preserve. Ruby's letters ultimately supply a salutary reminder of the past's, indeed our parents,' right to tell their own story in their own way. If we listen closely to Ruby and her contemporaries, we will learn that the generation of the 1950s represents more than mere creators of today's self-absorbed boomers."

Book Description
"Ruby wrote letters home almost every week....She wrote anything that came into her head: about her children and Fred, her housekeeping, food, clothes, her friends, activities, schemes for making money, her dreams for the future....Her letters, naive, intimate and lively, were always optimistic or poignant. We'd read them to each other on the phone or pass them around. Often we saved them." So writes Edna Staebler in her introduction to this edited collection of her sister Ruby's letters from the fifties. In 1957 when Edna first began to collect and edit these letters she did so simply because she was sure that others would enjoy reading them as much as her own family did. Nearly forty years later, the letters remain a joy to read and reclaim the ordinary voice of a housewife.

About the Author
Edna Staebler is an award-winning journalist and has been a regular contributor to Maclean's, Chatelaine and many other magazines. She is the author of Cape Breton Harbour, Places I've Been and People I've Known and the Schmecks cookbook series.