Leading with My Heart: My Life
Books / Hardcover
ISBN: 0671888005 / Publisher: Simon & Schuster, May 1994
President Clinton's mother looks back on her childhood, education, nursing career, marriages, relationships with her sons, and final struggle against cancer
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"When it comes to lipstick, I say the brighter the better," proclaimed Virginia Kelley of a detail from her famous morning makeup routine. It's a comment that might well stand as a motto for the attitude that carried this remarkable woman through an eventful life.Growing up poor in tiny Hope, Arkansas, she was the daughter of an affectionate, self-effacing father and a driven, often explosively angry mother. Virginia would revisit these emotional extremes in her five marriages to four men: handsome, charismatic Bill Blythe, the father Bill Clinton never knew; abusive, alcoholic Roger "Dude" Clinton, whom Bill loved, young Roger hated, and Virginia divorced and then remarried out of pity; flashy-dressing, soft-spoken Jeff Dwire, the hairdresser who did time for stock fraud and convinced Kelley to leave her gray streak undyed; and Dick Kelley, the retired food broker who provided strength and stability during an especially trying time in her life.The challenges were professional as well. To complete her training as a nurse anesthetist, Virginia left baby Bill with her mother while she trained at a hospital in New Orleans. Later, she would be drawn into a "thirty-year war" against the doctors she believed were bent on destroying her Hot Springs practice.But family always came first, and the chapters of her private life will strike deep chords of empathy and inspiration. Her determination to be a good mother to two sons with widely different talents and dreams, which underwent its toughest trial when Roger was arrested and imprisoned for cocaine dealing, will resonate with mothers everywhere. She candidly recalls a bumpy beginning with Hillary Rodham and her eventual decision to bury the hatchet for the sake of her son, opening the door to what would become a relationship of mutual admiration and affection. And, without self-pity, she tells of her courageous fight against breast cancer, which took her from life on January 6, 1994.Laced with Kelley's clear-eyed native optimism, characteristic saltiness, and matchless flair for storytelling, this is an incomparable slice of Southern life that spans a period of enormous social and political change in our nation's history.
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