57 pages • 1 hour read
Russell BakerGrowing Up
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Baker meets Mimi, a “stunning beauty” with a tenth grade education (205). She lives alone, has no family, drinks alcohol, entertains male visitors, and works at a makeup counter. She does not fit Lucy’s definition of “a good woman.” Mimi is too special for Baker to categorize, but Lucy preys on his faith in the “good woman” to sow doubts, telling him Mimi “wouldn’t be bad looking if she didn’t use so much makeup” (205). When the topic of marriage comes up, Baker tells Mimi “marriage isn’t in the cards” but is ashamed to admit why (207).
Born in New Jersey, Mimi is the only child of a volatile alcoholic and a devout Irish Catholic mother who suffered from seizures. Mimi’s first Christmas memory is of her father in a drunken rage. When Mimi is eleven, her mother is institutionalized. Her father surrenders her to an orphanage where Mimi spends four years. She becomes cynical, seeing the matrons save the best donated baked goods for themselves and parading the children before well-to-do patrons. Mimi escapes by reading. She enrolls in a college preparation program but is forced to switch to business.
Mimi runs away but is brought back. She appeals to a Catholic bishop, telling him the matron’s fundamentalist Protestant rituals are causing her to sin. He tells her she must be obedient, and Mimi loses faith in the church. She runs away again. With a fake identification card, she gets a job and moves in with an acquaintance. A romance with the acquaintance’s son ends in scandal after Mimi is seen with a married man. Her father invites her to Maryland then disappears. In Maryland, Mimi gets a job and moves into a rooming house.
When Baker returns from his Navy service, he feels too grown up for college. He gets a job at the post office and struggles “to become a sinner” by meeting women at bars. While on a blind date, he meets Mimi and is immediately smitten. His friend George suggests Baker play Professor Higgins to Mimi’s Eliza Doolittle. Baker invites her out repeatedly before she finally agrees. Eventually, he returns to college owing to the GI Bill and his mother’s persistent badgering.
Baker takes Mimi to Washington and spends hours dragging her around town and lecturing her about history and politics. When she begs to sit down, he realizes he has been boring her. He asks her about herself, and she tells her story, inspiring Baker to feel protective. He vows to show her how a gentleman treats a woman and foregoes the customary goodnight kiss. She invites him in, but he declines, saying love cloaked him in “the glory of sainthood” (217). When he calls her a few days later, she tells him she was scared he was not going to come back. He tells her he will always come back, and it turns out to be true.
Chapter 17 Summary
After three months of dating, Baker introduces Mimi to Lucy, who gathers her extended family for Sunday dinners as Ida Rebecca once did. Mimi says Lucy will never like her. Baker suspects Lucy fears history is repeating itself, with her now cast as the protective mother and Mimi as the “unsuitable woman” (221).
Baker graduates from Johns Hopkins in 1947 and goes to work at the Baltimore Sun. He longs to become “the next Hemingway,” not a newspaper “hack” (223). When he is offered a job as a police reporter at an anemic $30 per week, he immediately accepts. Baker finds the bustle of the newsroom “intoxicating” and is “paralyzed with awe” (223). As a police reporter, he scours Baltimore’s grittier neighborhoods for crimes and accidents to phone into the rewrite men. He notices they do not publish news about blacks. He works late into the night, often visiting Mimi when he gets off work. Though he feels increasingly dependent on her, he insists marriage is “not in the cards” (225).
Mimi quits her job as a bookkeeper after she is asked to keep two sets of books to evade taxes. With this loss of income, she is unable to afford her apartment. She and Baker fight over his not wanting to get married. She moves and asks him not to call her again. Lucy notices Baker is unhappy. He admits he is no longer seeing Mimi. Lucy supports his decision but also tells him that no success is worth it if he is unhappy.
At work, Baker moves up to covering assignments. During summer 1948, he teaches himself to type by writing a 70,000-word semi-autobiographical novel in three months. The novel is rejected, but his typing skills lead to him being called on to pitch in at the rewrite desk when the paper is short-staffed. He does so well that he is promoted and his salary increased. He calls Mimi, and they begin seeing each other again. He is “delighted” and “depressed about being a hopeless weakling” (23).
Lucy is not surprised when Baker tells her he and Mimi are dating again. Baker persists that marriage “isn’t in the cards.” Fed up, Mimi announces she is moving to Washington to work for a detective agency. They continue seeing each other once a week. In November, she leaves for a six-week business trip to the Carolinas. They exchange letters, and she raves about her crew boss, a former football player. A jealous Baker decides to find “a good woman” and dates a Smith graduate who asks him to take her to a strip club and tackles him in a taxi. Baker realizes Mimi has the superior character. When he calls her late on Christmas and she does not answer, he is consumed with jealousy and vows he never wants to see her again. When she returns from her trip, he meets her at the station and asks her to marry him.
Chapter 18 Summary
In autumn 1981, Baker and Mimi drive to Virginia to visit their younger son, his wife, and their three-month-old granddaughter. They stop in Baltimore to visit Doris, who is childless and a widow, and then stop by the old family home. Baker notes little has changed in 40 years. Herb died there of a heart attack in 1962. Mary Leslie is married with college-age children. Mary and Doris sold the house in 1977 when its maintenance became too much for Lucy. She moved in with Doris but never got over leaving her home.
Baker asks Mimi if she remembers their first Sunday dinner. She recalls the warm, happy feeling of family. Baker remembers her wearing “too much makeup” (236). Baker thinks Mimi never understood that his mother was a warrior protecting her children. He recalls telling his mother that he and Mimi were getting married. Though he knows she felt defeated, she helped him financially—cashing in a life insurance policy she had invested for him, financing his honeymoon, and hosting their wedding reception at her home. Mimi concedes that Lucy was “good” about their wedding but still stays in the car with her book when they arrive at the nursing home.
Four years have passed since the fall that “broke her last links to the outer world” (239). When she wakes up from a nap with Baker by her bedside, she does not recognize him. He tells her she is a great-grandmother and that he will bring the baby to meet her, which makes her smile. He asks if she remembers Mimi and Russell. She says she has never heard of them.
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
In the Foreword, Baker described his book as the story of a weak man steered by strong women. Much of the book has focused on his mother’s role guiding, and at times pushing, him to succeed. The book’s final three chapters introduce and explore the role of another strong woman in his life, his wife Mimi, who challenges his simplistic categorizations of women according to outdated ideals of good vs. bad. Mimi suffers a harsh childhood and finds a way to survive. Baker notes that Mimi and Lucy have being strong survivors in common, but Mimi is uneducated. She lacks the upper-class pedigree that Lucy aspires for her son. Baker has internalized his mother’s values and struggles to move past them. Mimi enthralls him. He admires and depends on her. He is unhappy without her, but he cannot bring himself to marry her.
Baker suspects Lucy realizes that Mimi is “her most formidable opponent” since Ida Rebecca (205). Lucy uses language to shape Baker’s perception, as she has done before, in this case referring to Mimi’s excessive use of makeup without making it seem like an insult. Mimi’s strategy is also indirect. She sees and talks about other men, stoking Baker’s jealousy. Dating a woman with the right pedigree but the wrong character helps break Baker of his simplistic categories and respect Mimi for her dignity and honesty. In the end, history does repeat itself in that Baker chooses his lover over his mother, as his father did. And like his father before him, Baker’s wife and mother-in-law never become easy with each other, suggested by Mimi waiting in the car when Baker visits his mother in the nursing home.
In Chapter 17, Baker takes his first step toward success in the career his mother suggested to him when he was eleven years old: he gets his first newspaper job. The bustle of the newsroom excites him, but he works at the paper three years before he is permitted to write for publication (223). His promotion to the rewrite desk results from patience (years at the paper) and effort (teaching himself to type), the lesson his mother has been trying to teach him throughout his life. Baker sought glory by joining the war effort and almost failed out. He sought glory in the newsroom and spends years hunting crime stories then writing general assignments—class reunions, neighborhood parades, YMCA elections. He wanted to be a writer because he thought it did not entail having to work hard, but as he suggests of writing this book in the Foreword, he has learned how to do the hard work of writing and succeeding. He has grown up and “made something of himself.”
In the book’s final scene, his still-fierce mother no longer remembers Baker or Mimi. She is beyond both the struggle to survive—financial hardships, the loss of loved ones—and the pleasure of seeing her dreams realized. Baker’s book ensures that though she no longer remembers, she and the world she came from are not forgotten.
