Looking for Lydia: Looking for God
Looking for Lydia: Looking for God is a memoir. It is a spiritual memoir. It is a confession. It is a family saga and a cameo of life in Norfolk, a southern city after the Civil War. It is the mystery of a nineteenth-century woman, come from Philadelphia to Norfolk, Virginia, the year the War ended, and the story of the mysteries that don’t get solved and the questions that don’t get answered. It is the study of the Bible that began in the Lydia H. Roper Home, in Norfolk, Virginia, and it has grown outward from there in the most unexpected ways. It is rooted on every page in the concrete details of the Roper Home and in the lives of the family that built and chartered it. It is, finally, a story about growing older for everyone, everywhere. Looking for Lydia is packed with detail. It sifts through layers of the Bible; the post-Civil War South; the lives of the women at the Lydia Roper Home; the lives of the women in the Roper family; the founding of a southern lumber empire by a carpetbagger from Pennsylvania; and, finally, the search for the elusive Lydia Roper. As you read, you will fall in love with a small group of women, in their ninth and tenth decades, as they discover the Bible, each other, and themselves.
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Prior to taking up writing with various essays and her debut book, Dean Robertson was a school teacher, retiring in 2006. After suffering a bad fall in 2013, Dean ended up convalescing at the Lydia Roper Home. There she met the amazing women who inspired her to teach them about the Bible. Soon it became clear that she was the student, and so the journey of the book began.