Well-Known Stories

So, here’s the vexing question of the week: How many of the well-known stories about Daisy Low should this biography include?

One of the challenges of writing about a celebrated historical figure is to fulfill the expectations of a hopefully wide and diverse readership. Meeting this particular challenge involves taking into account stories about the subject. This week I have been thinking about which legendary tales from the life of Juliette Gordon Low to include in my book. No definitive answer has presented itself, but that is the nature of writing: the process is somewhat sedimentary in the sense that layers of ideas and facts and interpretations build on one another, and are then mined and re-arranged as the book takes shape.

There are old favorite stories that Girl Scouts—former and current—have heard around campfires and can tell by heart about their founder. Other anecdotes might be a little less familiar. Some humorous yarns seem to be so essentially Daisy that no book about her would seem complete without them.

But I hope this biography will also be read by students of women’s history, children’s history, Southern history, and more. These readers may know nothing at all about how the Helpful Hands Club became known as the Helpless Hands Club, or why Daisy brought a dead dog home and put it in bed, or how she used the bustle of the woman in front of her as a shelf while waiting to be presented at court, or how she sold her pearls to help finance the Girl Scouts. These readers will come to the book with different expectations.

My biography will certainly be more than a series of Daisy anecdotes strung together chronologically, but the funny stories do have to be included as they provide a sense of her personality. The biographer’s job consists of locating, analyzing, and assigning weight and meaning to these bits of a life. The challenge is deciding which to put in and which to leave out. The method of selection is set by the need to focus on the important aspects of a life, but the process of including and excluding is not immediately obvious.

Too many comical stories will make Daisy Low seem silly or inconsequential or absent-minded. Too few will rob her of the humor she usually found at the core of living. I’m hoping for a balance that allows readers to see the many, often amusing, illogicalities of her existence as well as the determination, the pathos, and the sense of duty that culminated in the creation of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.