The Quilt of Her Life: A Biography of Victoria Anne Shulstad

By Raymond a Shulstad

This book is a chronology of the life of Victoria Anne Shulstad, my wife of 52 years. Instead of a biography written by her husband, I wanted it to be an autobiography written by her which I would edit and polish into final form. Although I got her to write down some of her family history and stories from her childhood, I failed to get her to take on writing her autobiography. Her excuses for not doing so started with her claim that she never liked writing and was not good at it. But, they also included her preferring not to remember some of the painful parts of her life. Without her enthusiastic and full participation, I almost abandoned the idea of a book about her. We have photo albums and scrap books that she has put together for every year in our life together. And, we have a wonderful video of our life together using photos from those albums that our son, Ray, created for our 50th Wedding Anniversary celebration on July 23, 2016. So, I tried to convince myself that there was no need to write a book. But, the more I thought about it, while the albums and videos are a great family history, they are comprised of events and activities and do not describe the feelings, perspectives, challenges and rewards that shaped her life. Additionally, our kids don't know much about their mother and her life. Her immediate family is small-only one sister, Jane. Vicki's mother died while she was in college and her father died a couple of years after we got married. So, our kids never got to know them. Vicki has a lot of cousins, but other than exchanging Christmas cards with a few of them, she not has had much contact with them over the years because most of my military career was spent away from Florida. So, if I didn't write down her story, it would have been lost forever and our kids, grandkids and future generations of our family would know very little about her. I had one final barrier to overcome to take on writing the book. I wanted her biography to be written fr

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1478768738
• ISBN13: 9781478768739
• Release Date: July 2018
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"