This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone

Written by Melissa Coleman

Narrated by Melissa Coleman

“Lyrical and down-to-earth, wry and heartbreaking, This Life Is in Your Hands is a fascinating and powerful memoir. Melissa Coleman doesn’t just tell the story of her family’s brave experiment and private tragedy; she brings to life an important and underappreciated chapter of our recent history.” —Tom Perrotta 

In a work of power and beauty reminiscent of Tobias Wolff, Jeannette Walls, and Dave Eggers, Melissa Coleman delivers a luminous, evocative childhood memoir exploring the hope and struggle behind her family's search for a sustainable lifestyle. With echoes of The Liars’ Club and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Coleman’s searing chronicle tells the true story of her upbringing on communes and sustainable farms along the rugged Maine coastline in the 1970’s, embedded within a moving, personal quest for truth that her experiences produced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Apr 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9780062081438

Melissa Coleman

As a freelance writer, Melissa Coleman has covered lifestyle, health, and travel. She lives in Freeport, Maine, with her husband and twin daughters.

Reviews for This Life Is in Your Hands

[dark_phoenix54 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Author Melissa Coleman was a child born during the back to the land movement of the 1960s-70s. Her parents, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearings book “Living the Good Life”- the story of how the Nearings moved to the unforgiving climate of the Maine coast and produced ‘all they needed’ from the land- moved to Maine, bought part of the Nearings property, and set out to do the same. What they didn’t realize was that the Nearings weren’t entirely truthful in their books. They went south for the winters, they made profits from the sales of their books that enabled them to buy small luxuries, and, perhaps most important to the story Coleman tells, they didn’t have children. While the Colemans weren’t hippies as hippies are commonly thought of- they didn’t do drugs, have any interest in communes or practice free love- they definitely strove to drop out of society. And really, they didn’t have any time for anything but the homestead. It was dawn to dusk (and after dusk and by the moon or kerosene lamps times), 365 days a year unending toil. Maine is a hard place to survive without modern conveniences. But after a couple of years, there was enough land cleared of trees and stumps, and the soil was enriched organically enough, that they had enough vegetables to be able to sell some at a roadside stand. Soon word of what they were doing got out, reporters came calling, and unpaid interns started showing up. The Colemans became famous within the organic and homesteading movement. While the interns meant more work could be done, they also were more mouths to feed, and then tended to spend their days on the farm naked. Even though they were finding themselves successful at homesteading, Melissa’s parents were having problems. Sue was emotionally fragile and overwhelmed by the work, and just couldn’t take the extra labor of raising the girls (author Melissa and her little sister Heidi) or the stress of watching her attractive husband working with young, naked blond women all day. It was she that was expected to feed everyone, to put food by for winter, to do the mending and sewing and cleaning and goat milking, on top of working outside on the farm. She suffers from depression, especially after childbirth. She mentally ‘checks out’ at times, ceasing to react to the children’s needs- or much of anything at all. Eliot, on the other hand, is nearly manic. A hyperactive thyroid gland drives him night and day, from project to project- projects that seize his entire attention, leaving little for his wife and children. Melissa and Heidi are basically left to grow wild, with the neighbors and the interns there physically for them but not emotionally. No one is really there emotionally for the girls. Then, one day, Heidi drowns in the pond. This is the last straw for the marriage and for the farm. The dream is over. The author seamlessly blends her own childhood recollections with accounts she’s garnered from talking with the adults who populated her childhood, allowing us a full view of what happened. In the course of these talks, she finally discovers that she was not to blame for Heidi’s death-something she was never accused of but felt guilty of just the same. She recreates the feel of the times, the idealism that infused these back to the landers. I remember this era well; the names and events she mentions bring back my own memories of how it felt to think that a homestead was the way to go, that this was the wave of the future, the way to health of both people and the planet, of having that same idealism the Colemans had. Excellent book.

[bookweaver · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed reading this book, but I'm not sure how valid it is as a work of nonfiction or as a memoir since Coleman seems too young to remember what she does about her family's situation. At times, the book seems a bit like propaganda for her father's movement. I also wonder why the family took such a hardcore approach to "off the grid" living and why it's different. now.

[cheriedooryard · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have to give this five stars because it was really very, very good. It was just sad. So sad. And not even just because it contains a heartbreakingly tragic event. When a story is written from the point of view of a child, and the main theme of the story is about pursuing a lifestyle at the expense of your family's well-being, it inevitably is just going to be sad.

[marshapetry · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Overall, an interesting book about the first wave of organic farmers; especially interesting because this family was one of the lead families of the wave. Behind every story is a good bit of "dirt" and this exposed that dirt with grace and gave it the appropriate amount of attention (i.e. it didn't make too big of a deal of it, just stated it and went on). It also exposed just how hard living organically can be, and how forceful a personality is needed to continue with that lifestyle. Unfortunately, it sounds like it tore up many families. The story lagged in places but I recommend it for anyone who lived thru the first organic years (~1970s), or anyone wanting to learn what it was like.

[gaillamontagne · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

You won't regret spending the time to read this book. Set during the early 1970's, in the forests of Maine, the author shares her childhood experiences as the daughter of an idealistic ,well-intentioned "back to the land" couple where heaven was just a garden away. The author's story reveals the fantasy, that we will all live better lives if we eat organic food, live without electrictiy or plumbing, and never partake of what the world has to offer. This generation forgot that people 120 years ago, who lived such as this, did so because they had few options and so often died early from disease and lack of medical care. I remember the song verse from "Woodstock", .... and we've got to get ourselves, back to the garden..... meaning a natural lifestyle. Some people took this a little too literally....... Anyway, the writing is vivid, wonderful and so clear in its imagery..."Mama doing her headstands, hair falling down on the sides of her head like broken wings".. ...Wow, what insight she has in her imagery . However, I wish the author whould have just paid a narrator to read her book. Her voice is gravelly, like she needs to clear the phelm out. Her tone was droning but I suffered through it because the writing itself is beautiful. Better read it and not listen to it.

[sleahey_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As someone who moved to the Maine Woods in my 20's, this book brought it all back: the mystique, the dreams, the drudgery, the spirit, and the naivete. Coleman's story has the added tragedy of her sister's drowning and the stresses on her parents' marriage, but the story is all too familiar and one I am glad to be reminded of.

[florinda_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's taken a few decades for the "organic" lifestyle to work its way into the mainstream, but during the last ten years or so, the desire to eat foods that have been produced in a sustainable, low-tech way seems to have become much more widespread, and the producers and consumers of these foods don't seem to be viewed so much as crunchy, hippie-ish fringe-dwellers these days. Having said that, the movement has honest roots among crunchy hippie fringe-dwellers, and Melissa Coleman's family were some of the people who planted those roots (pun intended, for the record). In her memoir, This Life Is In Your Hands, Coleman takes readers to Greenwood Farm on the Maine coast, the pioneering community where her father worked to advance sustainable agriculture...and where her family imploded.In some respects, Greenwood Farm would seem to be an idyllic place to experience one's childhood, particularly during the short and fertile New England summers. Melissa and her sisters could, quite literally, run around naked all day long, and they had the proverbial "village" of caretakers at hand in Greenwood Farm's "apprentices"--college and graduate students who came to work and learn from Melissa's father, Eliot, and who became an extended family. The less-than-idyllic part was that the Coleman children couldn't always count on their own parents. Eliot's first devotion was to the farm, even at, ironically, the risk of his own health; the girls' mother Sue was, all too often, just overwhelmed by the challenges of their everyday lives. The "pioneering" of the Colemans and their associates went all the way--they lived without electricity and indoor plumbing in small houses they built themselves.I was quite intrigued by the fact that Eliot and Sue both came from fairly privileged backgrounds--particularly on Eliot's side, where there are some names straight out of the Preppy Handbook--and in choosing this "simple," "good" life for their family, they also chose extreme poverty. In some ways, there are similarities to Melissa Coleman's story and that of Jeannette Walls' family in The Glass Castle, but Melissa's parents chose to work a lot harder. Still, it's the rejection of a certain form of privilege that interests me, because in many ways, the products of the lifestyle that the Colemans chose instead remain most readily available to the privileged, even now. But Melissa Coleman was a child during the years at Greenwood Farm, and it's her evocation of the wonders and feelings of childhood that make This Life Is In Your Hands such compelling reading. The adults in her life are frequently portrayed as seen through a child's eyes, which makes the effects on that child when they really don't live up to being adults that much more devastating. Without much exposure to other influences, children can be pretty accepting that whatever they know as "normal" is "the norm," but they may still have an innate sense of when the world around them feels wrong. Coleman conveys that well; reading her story, I had the feeling early on that things wouldn't quite work out, but I was completely surprised by the event that ultimately undid the family at Greenwood Farm.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

We have a cottage that has been in my family for almost 100 years now. It has only had modern conveniences for fewer than 20 years. So when we spent time there when I was a child, we had no electricity and no phone. It was a throwback to an older time. But I learned a lot, sewing, quilting, basket-making, and so on, spending weeks without all the technology that people have become accustomed to these days both as a crutch and a convenience. The one thing we didn't do, though, was grow our own food. We don't live there year round so there was never any suggestion that we live a self-sustaining life. The upkeep and maintenance on the cottage was constant enough and hard enough. Unlike our summer vacation and its annual but brief, wonderful novelty, Melissa Coleman and her family lived without modern conveniences, working toward self-sustainability, and farming organically all the time as part of the forefront of the back to the land, homesteader movement of the late sixties and early seventies as she recounts in this detailed memoir of their time at Greenwood Farm.Ranging from her parents' upbringings in regular upper middle class families, how they met, their courtship, and what led them to reject the lifestyles in which they were raised, embracing instead the mantra of the homesteading lifestyle as described by Helen and Scott Nearing in their groundbreaking work: Living the Good Life for the nine years they spent on the coast of Maine working the land and living off the grid as much as possible, Coleman details the rewards and the hardships of the life their family chose to lead. Eliot and Sue Coleman were in the vanguard of the back to the land movement buying sixty acres adjacent to the Nearings and living by the tenets proposed in their book. But this life wasn't easy by any means. And the locals remained suspicious, keeping the tiny homesteading community (several others eventually joined them) separate and essentially isolated from the townsfolk. For a child, the life was both idyllic and lonely. There was not much adult supervision at all given the demands of a working farm but Coleman and her younger sister missed out on a lot of the loving attention that supervision also contains within it.As the Colemans' dream of creating a self-sustaining farm starts to come together over the years, their marriage frays under the stresses of their work and the compromises that inevitably mar their utopia. Sue "checks out" on her kids and clearly suffers from post-partum depression after all three of her daughters are born. She doesn't like the advent of the residential volunteers, anxious to learn from Eliot, especially given his rising notoriety as an organic food advocate and sustainable farming expert, and their impact on the small, closed society of the farm. Eliot, on the other hand, holds fast to his dream, willing to make certain compromises (a vegetarian who eschews meat for both health and moral reasons willing to kill newborn billy goats because they add nothing to the farm) but not other more vital ones (he believes his diet alone, already lacking in some nutrients, can cure his Graves' disease). He starts to travel more frequently, leaving the burden of the farm on Sue's less capable shoulders.Coleman doesn't shy away from acknowledging the flaws in her parents' dream but she doesn't go into detail about the small things that contributed to the tension and the stress and the disillusionment that were slowly rending their family apart even before the tragedy that finally shattered their dream forever. She foreshadows the tragedy right from the beginning of the book and so its eventual advent is not a surprise but a culmination of the tension that has been slowly rising throughout the book. She is most adept at the descriptions of nature and of her own childhood experiences here. Although she has done research and conducted interviews with others to fill in the gaps of what she wouldn't or couldn't know at the time, including her parents' early years, the way that these portions are presented as if she was actually present is a bit jarring on the reader and certainly come off as idealized. In addition, the ending of the book is quite abrupt with an epilogue that admits to the book as her way to try and make sense of her early years and especially the accident but it doesn't answer any questions about how her life then really affects her life now and what she may have taken away from the lessons she learned.Coleman has woven a loose history of the beginnings of the organic food movement, the drive to eat locally (although how local avocados, common to her school lunches, are to the Maine coast is rather questionable), homesteading, and living gently on the land in with her family's story. And sometimes the details of the history overwhelm the sadder but more engaging family story. A tale of a dream and a family that couldn't be sustained despite the best of intentions, this is nevertheless an interesting story. Living a lifestyle that most of us would never consider, even as we incorporate certain of its tenets into our life now more and more, the compromises and the failures and the ultimate, terrible price the Coleman family paid, Melissa Coleman has afforded readers an intimate glimpse into a hoped for paradise that never quite achieved its name.

[tjsjohanna_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm ambivalent about this memoir. On the one hand, it is a unique look at a movement from the early 70's - homesteading and organic farming. There is much to glean about the movement and the things that were accomplished. On the other hand, the story of the family is weak. There is an attempt to make it about the tragedy of the Heidi's death, but in the end it is more about the failure of two people to be committed to each other and their family. And the writing style didn't work for me. I found it off-putting that Ms. Coleman chose to write about events as a witness, even when she was too young to remember. As well, her inclusion of events in the outside world helped to place the homesteading experiences in context, but the way she chose to do it was also bothersome. It lent a feeling that the people in this narrative had a sense of the great and important historical events that were occurring, when the reality is that usually we only see the importance of things in hindsight. I do think what this memoir lacks is a spiritual framework to make sense of this family's experiences. Ms. Coleman herself alludes to this fact at the end of chapter seven, but never seems to come to any conclusion, other than to note that it was missing in their lives. There is a lot of beautiful description and Ms. Coleman succeeds in making me understand just what it takes to make a living off the land.

[nightprose · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

To say this book is a beautifully written memoir does not do it justice. Melissa Coleman tells the story of her parents and what moved them not to be hippies, but to be true back-to-nature farmers. They were not interested in the drug culture, altering their minds, or a commune way of life. They wanted only to provide a natural, simple, down to earth life for themselves and their family.Following the example, of Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of Living the Good Life, Eliot and Sue Coleman forged out a sixty acre farm on coastal Maine. It is there they built their home, and then had first Melissa and later her sister, Heidi.Melissa tells the story of her family, their farm and the simpler way of life they embraced. She writes of a childhood full of eating wild blueberries, running naked in the rain, making homemade bread, chopping wood and gathering seaweed. It is a full and happy life for the Coleman’s.There comes a point though, when Melissa’s parent’s relationship is strained and pulled apart by outside influences and stresses. Not long after, the sudden tragic death of her three year old sister tears the family and all that it was, all that it stood for apart, leaving only broken dreams in its wake. Melissa is left to neighbors as her family disintegrates.This book is Melissa Coleman’s search to sort through her families dreams, to make sense of what happened and why, how such beauty could have gone so awry. She looks to answer how one can find forgiveness when there is no actual blame. Truly, a thread of wisdom winds throughout her book, as she teaches us the price of sacrifice and the value of forgiveness.

[theloislevel · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed reading this book, but I'm not sure how valid it is as a work of nonfiction or as a memoir since Coleman seems too young to remember what she does about her family's situation. At times, the book seems a bit like propaganda for her father's movement. I also wonder why the family took such a hardcore approach to "off the grid" living and why it's different. now.

[lahochstetler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is Coleman's memoir of growing up on a homesteading farm in rural Maine in the 1970s. Coleman's parents moved to the backwoods of Maine to experiment with organic farming and self-sufficient living. The early years were idyllic, but things deteriorated. Coleman's parents had been warned that homesteading with children was nearly impossible. The stress of managing Coleman and her two sisters, combined with postpartum depression, threw her mother into a tailspin of despair. The vitamin deficiencies in the family's self-produced diet affected moods and energy.As the Colemans' efforts gained notoriety a series of apprentices shifted through the homestead, and Coleman's parents' marriage deteriorated. The final straw was the accidental death of Coleman's sister Heidi. Much of the book tells the story of the slow deterioration of the Coleman family. This books offers a fascinating look inside the homesteading movement, and inside a family. The Colemans lived at the center of the Maine homesteading community. Their farm was adjacent to that of Helen and Scott Nearing, and the Nearings play a significant role in the book. Melissa's childhood was tragic in many ways- a little girl, desperate for friends and parental attention, her needs were generally secondary to a larger ideology. The farm was an all-consuming project, and its residual side-effects left little affective or attentive surplus for Melissa. My one complaint about the book is that it could be shorter; there were times I found it repetitive. This does serve to suggest the constant demands of the homestead, but I still think it could have been trimmed. This is a memoir well-worth reading.

[eenerd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Page-turning memoir of life on an organic farm in mid-coast Maine in the 1970's, at a high-point of the back-to-the-land movement. The Coleman family was idealistic and hard-working, but the life they chose for themselves turned out to be ruinous for the whole family, while at the same time inspiring generations of organic farmers and other ecologically minded people. Fascinating and tragic, yet allows you to retain the idealism and hope for the future that the family was working for all along.

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Caught up in the idealism of the early 1970's, the author's parents established a homestead in the inhospitable wilds of Maine. Their unorthodox lifestyle, which involved constant labor, anxiety and poor diet, eventually lead to the drowning death of their young daughter and the dissolustion of their marriage. In some parts, Coleman's writing is achingly beautiful. In other parts she rather jarringly switches perspective between her adult and young self, and reports as fact the emotional states of others (that she couldn't possibly know). Nonetheless, on balance, this is a moving story of paradise lost.

[lauriebrown54 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Author Melissa Coleman was a child born during the back to the land movement of the 1960s-70s. Her parents, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearings book “Living the Good Life”- the story of how the Nearings moved to the unforgiving climate of the Maine coast and produced ‘all they needed’ from the land- moved to Maine, bought part of the Nearings property, and set out to do the same. What they didn’t realize was that the Nearings weren’t entirely truthful in their books. They went south for the winters, they made profits from the sales of their books that enabled them to buy small luxuries, and, perhaps most important to the story Coleman tells, they didn’t have children. While the Colemans weren’t hippies as hippies are commonly thought of- they didn’t do drugs, have any interest in communes or practice free love- they definitely strove to drop out of society. And really, they didn’t have any time for anything but the homestead. It was dawn to dusk (and after dusk and by the moon or kerosene lamps times), 365 days a year unending toil. Maine is a hard place to survive without modern conveniences. But after a couple of years, there was enough land cleared of trees and stumps, and the soil was enriched organically enough, that they had enough vegetables to be able to sell some at a roadside stand. Soon word of what they were doing got out, reporters came calling, and unpaid interns started showing up. The Colemans became famous within the organic and homesteading movement. While the interns meant more work could be done, they also were more mouths to feed, and then tended to spend their days on the farm naked. Even though they were finding themselves successful at homesteading, Melissa’s parents were having problems. Sue was emotionally fragile and overwhelmed by the work, and just couldn’t take the extra labor of raising the girls (author Melissa and her little sister Heidi) or the stress of watching her attractive husband working with young, naked blond women all day. It was she that was expected to feed everyone, to put food by for winter, to do the mending and sewing and cleaning and goat milking, on top of working outside on the farm. She suffers from depression, especially after childbirth. She mentally ‘checks out’ at times, ceasing to react to the children’s needs- or much of anything at all. Eliot, on the other hand, is nearly manic. A hyperactive thyroid gland drives him night and day, from project to project- projects that seize his entire attention, leaving little for his wife and children. Melissa and Heidi are basically left to grow wild, with the neighbors and the interns there physically for them but not emotionally. No one is really there emotionally for the girls. Then, one day, Heidi drowns in the pond. This is the last straw for the marriage and for the farm. The dream is over. The author seamlessly blends her own childhood recollections with accounts she’s garnered from talking with the adults who populated her childhood, allowing us a full view of what happened. In the course of these talks, she finally discovers that she was not to blame for Heidi’s death-something she was never accused of but felt guilty of just the same. She recreates the feel of the times, the idealism that infused these back to the landers. I remember this era well; the names and events she mentions bring back my own memories of how it felt to think that a homestead was the way to go, that this was the wave of the future, the way to health of both people and the planet, of having that same idealism the Colemans had. Excellent book.