The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life by Rod Dreher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After hearing the buzz about this book for a while, and having enjoyed Rod’s first book (Crunchy Cons), I picked this up last week and got right to it. I’m glad I did.

Rod Dreher and his sister Ruthie grew up on a farm near St. Francisville, Louisiana, a community of about 1,700. As children growing up in a small community, Rod and Ruthie’s lives were not very exciting, but for the most part, they were wholesome. They did a lot of fishing and hunting, and they spent weekends hanging out with friends and family. St. Francisville was a close-knit town.

But when Rod became a teenager, he found himself interested more in ideas than the outdoors, and he began to despise the confinement and the lack of imagination he saw in his hometown. He wanted to leave.

His attitude was difficult for those around him, including Ruthie. Rod’s father wanted him to take over the family farm, but Rod didn’t want to. They started to fight a lot. Eventually, after Rod graduated from LSU, he left St. Francisville to become a journalist in Washington, D.C. He wasn’t planning to return.

As Rod worked as a big-city journalist, his career began to take off. He wrote for, among other places, the New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, and National Review. He enjoyed French food and trips to Europe, and was on television frequently. Rod had made it big.

Ruthie, however, stayed in St. Francisville. She married her high school sweetheart, who became a local firefighter. They had three daughters, and Ruthie taught at the local middle school. Her family built a house right across the road from the farm where she and Rod grew up, so the grandparents were right across the way.

Rod was happy with his cosmopolitan life, and Ruthie was happy with hers. Over the years, the tension between them built.

Then, two years ago, Ruthie was diagnosed with a rare and particularly vicious form of lung cancer. It looked like she had only a few months to live.

From this point on through the next few months, Rod saw something happening in St. Francisville that changed his life. Rod saw what it meant for Ruthie to have stayed in a place where she had deep roots. He saw Ruthie’s friends, her family, and her entire community rally around her. Neighbors, friends, coworkers, acquaintances, others who didn’t know Ruthie personally but had known her parents—all these folks showed love and support in many ways not only to Ruthie but to the entire Leming family.

I don’t want to give away more of the story, but it is powerful.

But take caution. Honestly, reading this can be tough. We Americans tend to value success over community. We tend to think little of deep, incarnated relationships. We are taught from countless sources that it’s a good thing to leave your roots and do whatever you can to “make it big.”

Because career success trumps all, our families and communities suffer. We use the term “quality time” to avoid the guilt of not spending quantity time with people. We don’t deeply know our next-door neighbors or even our own families. We tend to find our community on Facebook.

Like I said, reading this book can be tough. Rod hits close to home.

But he also shows the value of a quieter, more wholesome, more meaningful life waiting for us if we commit ourselves to giving back to the communities that have given to us. Whether this means moving back or simply settling down, it’s a wonderful thing when we have the opportunity to build deep roots. Not everyone has that opportunity, but more of us probably do than we realize.

Another aspect of the book that I appreciate is that Dreher shows that it’s not necessarily easy. As Dreher decides to reconnect with his own family and hometown, there’s a lot of baggage he has to deal with. Dreher is painfully, painfully honest. I won’t say more.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is a very good book--one that shows the value of family, of community, and of relationships. I’m glad I read it, and I hope many other readers take it to heart too.


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