Student 1
Urfavorite Student
Mr. Pacenski
11 Academic American Literature
[DATE]
Ellen Foster A.K.A. Kaye Gibbons
Kaye Gibbon’s novel Ellen Foster is a compassionate book about an eleven year old
heroine. Ellen is a brave little girl whom has already faced many hardships in her young life. Her
mother, the only person that ever loved or cared about Ellen, commits suicide, leaving her with
her drunken, abusive father, whom makes sexual threats towards Ellen. The young girl goes
through life wanting for affection; desperately striving to find a real family. She goes to many
lengths to get away from her father because all she dreams of is a normal family life. The book
sets a tone for this with its opening paragraph.
When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or
that way and run it down through my head until it got easy. (Ellen, 1)
Though not mentioned in the novel, there is a strong correlation between the main
character’s hardships in Ellen Foster and those faced by its writer, Kaye Gibbons. The correlation
is the association or the relationship between the two and the hardships they faced does not
pertain to where they lived, but with which kind of family they lived with. One incident that shows
that there is a correlation between Ellen Foster and Kaye Gibbons is during an interview Kaye
stated that the reason she wrote Ellen Foster.
I was meeting kind of a personal challenge, how to express the highest ideals we
share as human beings, our hope, pity, honor, honesty, courage, and so forth, in
the most elemental, simplest voice I could manage. (Interview with Kaye
Gibbons, 2).
Student 2
Also, in the interview, Kaye Gibbon’s states,
I know we only live once, but through Ellen, I’m able to live twice. Being able to
turn over old ground, to root around in my past, explore choices, and have Ellen
make different decisions, create fresh possibilities – so I feel grateful for the gift
of a life relived she represents. (Interview with Kaye Gibbons, 2).
She is basically saying that Ellen portrays herself in the novel. When she states that she
"feels grateful for the gift of life relived", she probably feels grateful because through Ellen she is
expressing her feelings about her own childhood and how she hated her own drunken father.
In one biography an unknown author says that
"like Gibbons, Ellen too is only ten years old when her mother kills herself by
ingesting an entire bottle of pills. Also autobiographical is Gibbons's portrayl of
Ellen's father, who eventually drinks himself to death, as Gibbons's own alcoholic
father did. In Ellen Foster, Gibbons fictionalizes her true life search for a loving
home. Like Ellen, Gibbons found such a home with a foster mother after suffering
much abuse by her cruel, self-involved relatives." (Sparknotes, 1).
In another biography on Kaye Gibbons it is said that Kaye wrote the novel with such
"honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word" (Percy, 1). Most writers do not have very
effective first novels, but Kaye's first novel is a very affectionate and very full of emotion. This is
because in Ellen Foster, Kaye basically describes her own family from her childhood memories.
This makes the novel seem more real because it is almost like an autobiography with a few
changes. What helps express this as truth is, when during the interview, Kaye stated
"being able to turn over old ground, to root around in my past, explore choices,
and have Ellen make different decisions, create fresh possibilities, all of the life-
Student 3
editing I can do as a novelist sometimes feels like kinda of a consolation prize."
(Kaye, 2).
Also, in Ellen Foster, Kaye refuses to use quotation marks for dialogue. This makes us
wonder who is actually speaking and maybe we realize that by doing this Kaye is really
expressing dialogue that remembers from her childhood. Maybe the reason she doesn't use
quotations for Ellen's dialogue is because really Kaye is expressing herself through Ellen and
since they are not Ellen's thoughts, but Kaye's, she does not write the quotation marks in her
novel.
Basically, Ellen Foster and Kaye Gibbons are mirror images of each other. Kaye's first
novel was a way for her to express her childhood anger and sadness. Through Ellen she was
able to share with the world her very humiliating and depressing life experiences. It was a way for
her to backlash on her very self-involved and unhelpful relatives that only hurt her more during
her time of need as a young girl. And yet not mentioned in the novel, there is a very strong
correlation between the main character’s hardships in Ellen Foster and those faced by its writer,
Kaye Gibbons. This belief is proven by the many statements made by Kaye in her numerous
interviews. Also, we see that her childhood life was almost exactly how Ellen's is described in the
novel, but with only a few changes that Kaye wished herself had made.