Jigsaw, Some Pieces Missing

Memories of Childhood and Youth

By Louisa Foulke Newlin

Memoir

July 2022

250 pages, $9.95 USD

Trade Paper Original

ISBN: 978-1-94042-318-0 (print)

What do we remember from our formative years? For Louisa Foulke Newlin the answer is, practically everything.

The recollections in Jigsaw capture not only the cultural atmosphere of the ’40s and ’50s, but also the emotions of a young woman finding her place in the world. By turns comic, insightful, and poignant, the puzzle-pieces of this narrative are assembled into a satisfying whole.

“There was a little wooden table, painted blue, with an attached chair in which I sat for meals and for practicing writing the letters Yan taught me. I remember the thrill of realizing that by putting different letters in front of “at,” I could make different words: Cat! Sat! Rat! Mat!”

Louisa Foulke Newlin has been a teacher and educator for more than six decades. She earned an M.A. in English from Radcliffe and a Ph.D in Literary Studies from American University, and taught English in Washington at several high schools, public and private, and at American University; at the College of the Atlantic in Maine; at the International School in Brussels; and at the Lycée de Valbonne in France. Newlin was instrumental in the early development of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s high school education programs, including the Student Shakespeare Festival, the High School Fellowship Program, and the Shakespeare’s Sisters seminar. Her work has been published in many magazines and journals, beginning with a poem in The New Yorker when she was sixteen, and including a short story in The Atlantic Monthly that won second prize as an “Atlantic First.” With her husband of more than 65 years, a retired Foreign Service officer, Newlin has lived in Paris, Guatemala, Brussels, and Nice, always returning to their home in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C