"The Gospel Of Trees: A Memoir"

Apricot Anderson Irving (apricotirving.com) describes herself as "a recovering missionary's daughter"; when she was six, in 1981, she and her "parents moved to the north of Haiti to be missionaries--not far from where Columbus sank the Santa María."

Later she pieced together their complicated relationship with Haiti. It's told in "The Gospel Of Trees: A Memoir" ($26 in hardcover from Simon & Schuster and available at the Chico Library; also for Amazon Kindle). Irving's exquisite prose focuses on her parents, and especially her dad, Lee Anderson.

"My father, a missionary agronomist," she writes, "is a man of the earth, his fingernails perpetually stained with berries and dirt. His first language is trees. …" Her mother, Flip Divine, "a skateboard city girl with curls that bounced against her backpack, waltzed into his life without a permit (or so he claimed)."

The book details the missionary service in Haiti as the family expanded to include little sisters Laura Meadow and Rose Ember. Apricot's mother experienced misgivings about the privileges she as a white missionary, a blan, received. "'What am I doing here in Haiti?' she asked the family journal. 'Has God brought me to Haiti to enjoy the luxurious lifestyle? I don't think so.'"

Apricot's relationship with her father is fraught (both are strong-willed), and her memoir is unstinting in its honesty. As a kid she loved the lizards; as a teenager she felt imprisoned; as a daughter she observed her parents' fragile marriage. 

Years later she returned to Haiti to cover the horrendous earthquake of 2010 for This American Life. Earlier she had realized that "beauty, it seemed, had been here all along: a wild summons, a name for God that did not stick in my throat. It felt suddenly absurd that as missionaries we had come to teach Haitians about God. God was already here. Maybe our only job was to bear witness to the beauty--and the sorrow. Without denying either one." 

Irving is scheduled to appear at the Chico Library on Thursday, October 11 at 6:30 p.m. for a reading and signing. The event, sponsored by Chico Friends of the Library, is free and open to the public.