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“When you get to be my age and you look back on
your life, you try to see how all of the different threads
of your life make sense,” says Plum Lind Johnson,
whose touching memoir
They Left Us Everything
was
published in 2014. Growing up, Plum wanted to be a
writer and onstage actress, but felt that she lacked
the confidence to achieve these dreams. “Now, I feel
like all of these doors have been opened. It’s a very
exciting time for me.”
When her parents’ health began to decline, Plum
and her brothers took on caregiver roles, looking
after them for nearly 20 years before her father and
then mother passed away.
They Left Us Everything
chronicles Plum’s experience with clearing out her
parents’ home after her mother’s death. Inherent
in this huge undertaking was a sense of duty that
Plum had not anticipated. As Plum touched each
of her parents’ things one by one and revisited the
memories attached to each, she became more
and more intrigued with everything that she was
discovering in the house. The light bulb moment came
over her one day as she drove to a thrift store to drop
off some boxes. The thrift store was packed with stuff
that looked exactly like hers and, Plum says, she was
“struck by the speed at which people were dropping
stuff off. It looked like we were throwing away the
whole of the 20th century!”
As Plum wrote down her memories, a manuscript
began to emerge. When asked whether she had
any reservations about the exposure of publishing
a personal memoir, Plum admits to worrying about
the mother-daughter theme inherent in her writing.
“I was afraid that once the book was published, I’d
have critics saying that I was undutiful. I worried
that I hadn’t done Mum justice.” Nonetheless, Plum
was not worried about giving voice to secrets. In her
view, “we help each other if we confess more. We
sometimes learn too late in life that secrets don’t do
anyone any good.”
Plum reflects that the Havergal community
contributed to her love of both writing and acting.
Two English teachers whom she had while at Havergal
(Mrs. Catharine Fowler and Miss Georgia Phillips)
inspired her desire to write. Old Girls Kate Reid 1949
and Clare Coulter 1961 influenced Plum’s love of
theatre; Kate, a Broadway actress in New York, taught
Plum how to imagine and create scenes and Clare, an
award-winning Canadian actress, directed Plum and
her classmates in plays produced at Havergal. Plum
credits these writing and theatre experiences for
helping her both write her memoir and stand in front
of crowds at speaking engagements about her book.
“Mrs. Phillips used to say ‘don’t write until you
have something to say’,” Plum recalls from her
Havergal days. “Well, it has taken 50 years, but now
I have a lot to say!”
Chronicling a lifetime of memories
PLUM LIND JOHNSON 1965
Profile by Katharine Brickman 2007
PROFILES