Rave Reviews from the Press for
Winnie: “My Life in the Institution”
(first edition)
The New York Times Book Review
December 1, 1985
Twenty years ago, a woman who had lived her life in a mental institution wrote a book to prove she wasn’t retarded. Jamie Pastor Bolnick read the handwritten, 20-odd-page manuscript and decided the story was worth telling. She interviewed the woman and pieced the transcripts together with the original manuscript, changing names and a few details. Of below-average intelligence, Gwynna Sprockett was orphaned as an infant, treated badly by foster parents and committed to an institution at the age of 6. She was brutalized by some of the attendants, but a teacher encouraged her to read and write. She struggled with a mind able to sense its limitations but often incapable of overcoming them. She later died, still in an institution. Winnie Sprockett’s voice gives life to this familiar story. Although she could not remember the number of weeks in a year or how to tell time, she had an uncanny memory for details of her life. She was a natural storyteller, dropping easily into dialogue and recounting events expressively. This is a portrait of a damaged but exceptional mind.
- Lillian Thomas
Psychology Today
February 1986
From the inside out
Consider a 6-year-old girl who is committed to an institution for the mentally retarded, who upon admission cannot wash or dress herself, speak clearly, read or write. Then consider one other fact: After about 25 years of being lied to, ignored, virtually forgotten by her foster parents, tutored and sometimes abused by her caretakers, this “retarded” girl decides to write an account of her life.
In Winnie: My Life in the Institution, journalist Jamie Pastor-Bolnick has taken Winnie’s original 20-odd-page “autobiography” and expanded it with hundreds of hours of interviews that Pastor-Bolnick conducted with her. Winnie’s insights and longings reveal the demeaning, as well as the humorous, side of institutional life. When yelled at for taking things that do not belong to her, Winnie’s logical response is, “Well, what can I take? Nothing is mine!”
Winnie yearns to be like Cinderella, but in a rare moment before a mirror retreats in horror as she sees what she actually looks like: “My hair’s too short, it makes me look retarded.”
Winnie died at age 44 while still in the institution, remarkably having retained her dignity and sense of purpose through her long confinement. In retrospect, many of the staff believe her retardation stemmed only from an extremely deprived childhood. Despite the tragic implication of this, Winnie and “her book” give us a chance to see ourselves—our passions and prejudices—from the perspective of someone on the inside looking out.
-Patricia Long
Publishers Weekly
October·18, 1985
At the core of this book is an account written by a woman who, committed to a state institution (unidentified here) at the age of six, spent her life in a struggle for selfhood. Her poignant writing, originally attempted to nullify a relative’s taunt that she was retarded, is supplemented by interviews with and reflections of freelance journalist Pastor-Bolnick, whose interest in Winnie (Gwynna Sprockett) whom [s]he first met when [s]he was 12, developed into friendship. Winnie’s own words open to the reader the stratified world of retarded men, women and children. Following her death in 1976 at the age of 44, professionals evaluating her case concluded that Winnie, the victim of societal rejection when her parents died, would not have been institutionalized today. A tragic book, full of Winnie’s wonderful zest that often got her into trouble, but makes her memorable on these pages.
Library Journal
In the late 1930s, six-year-old Winnie was committed to an institution for the “feeble-minded and incorrigible.’’ She was only mildly retarded, and people who worked closely with her over the years believed that her problems were caused primarily by a severely deprived childhood. Today she would probably be placed in a group home, but she remained institutionalized for the rest of her life. Winnie wrote her “book,’’ 20 handwritten pages, in the mid-1960s. Pastor-Bolnick interviewed her at length, and expanded her story, using Winnie’s irrepressible voice. The result is a convincing account, devoid of interpretation or apology, of what life was like for Winnie (who died in 1976, at the age of 44) and the other inmates. For specialized collections.
Margaret B. Allen, M.L.S., formerly with Bennington Free Library, VT
Kirkus Reviews
October 15, 1985
Gwynna Sprockett was committed to a state institution for mentally retarded females in 1938, age six. Except for two short forays outside, the remained institutionalized until her death at [44]. In a rebellious effort to prove she wasn’t retarded, Winnie wrote a book about her life. That material landed in Pastor-Bolnick’s hands and she—using information gathered from interviews with Winnie, her attendants and her social worker—has created a first-person account of Winnie’s life.
Her life stripped to the bare essentials, Winnie feels basic pleasures intensely. Her book expresses the thrill and wonder of learning to read, the joy of waking up for the first time in a room with flowered paper on the walls and the pride in being able to care for a friend or take a bus by herself. And when love enters her neglected life, whether in the form of a family member who finally has the chance to show how much she cares or a special friend who takes the time to be sympathetic, one feels the full impact of anyone’s need for human affection and warmth no matter what their mental state.
There is no real villain here. It seems clear that Winnie needed the special attention that only an institution could provide (at least in 1938), and although she encounters some mean-spirited souls, there are many who genuinely care and do their best to help. The tragedy, if there is one, is that when Winnie finally gets a chance to taste the joys of freedom, the only available setting is a nursing home, where there is no one her own age or anyone who shares her special problems. Winnie is unable to adapt and is sent back to the institution.
Beyond being a touching—and sometimes very funny—testament to an irrepressible spirit, Winnie reflects the need for human kindness and the power it has to nurture the spirit, even when life seems to have conspired to crush it.
Mademoiselle
February 1986
by Joyce Maynard
I want to mention another book that arrived in my mailbox the very day I was heading to the post office to mail this review. It’s called Winnie, My Life in the Institution, and though the writer responsible for putting the book together is Jamie Pastor Bolnick, the voice—throughout this funny, wise, heartbreaking book—is that of a woman named Gwynna (Winnie) Sprockett, deposited in an institution for the mentally retarded at the age of 6, left there for years, and then transported to another where she died at the age of 44.
Jamie Pastor Bolnick spent her childhood summers in the town where Winnie lived, and returned there after college to work in the institution. She and Winnie became friends, and several years later, she returned again to help Winnie tell her story. Based on a 20-page diary Winnie called her “book” (and hours of taped interviews), Winnie... is a story of unspeakable injustices and cruelties, ... [but] also contains an almost incomprehensible optimism and good cheer.
A stepmother who could have come straight out of Hansel and Gretel abandoned her in an institution where they chopped off her braids and placed her spaghetti dinner on the floor with instructions to eat it like an animal. Yet somehow Gwynna managed to remain a generous, affectionate woman, curious and eager to learn, hungry for any sort of human connection.
Unsentimental, wonderfully comic and also unbearably sad, this is not a book only for people interested in institutions or mental retardation. (The speculation of the writer and Gwynna’s social worker, in fact, is that Winnie was only “functionally” retarded—her IQ diminished not by any physical defect, but by neglect.) This book is simply the story of a woman who managed to grow and even thrive with about as much nourishment and care as a weed gets growing through the crack in a sidewalk.
To her, a particular source of joy was opening a window and looking at an apple tree. I’m looking out my own window at the moment, seeing the apple tree in the field beyond my house, and realizing that, unlike Gwynna Sprockett, I could go out there and climb it right now, if I wanted to. It’s not often that people remember to value freedoms that basic. Reading this book makes one’s life seem, suddenly, infinitely precious.
Readings: A Journal of Reviews
and Commentary in Mental Health
March 1986
A book worth more than many textbooks on mental retardation and on human relations. The story is in Winnie’s own words as told to the author. Winnie was abruptly dumped by her mother into an institution at six years of age. and left there without having been told why or that she would have to stay. For years Winnie had practically no visitors. Reading this book, Winnie’s rage becomes our own: at the unfeeling. cruel disregard of her emotions and at her total situation which was relieved only occasionally by the kindness of two professionals, a teacher and a social worker. Winnie is only borderline retarded and today probably would not be institutionalized. Still, much of the arrogance and disregard of human dignity by those in power persists inside and outside institutions. This book should be read by anyone working with people.
-Gisela Konopka, DSW, Minneapolis
Providence Sunday Journal
December 22, 1985
Eloquent statement
The simple story of a mildly retarded woman raised in an institution, Winnie is an eloquent statement about the human condition—good and bad sides alike.
Winnie was 6 and a little bit slow the day in 1938 when her foster mother packed her into a car and drove her to an institution where she was left without being told she wasn’t going home. From that opening scene to the end, where a grownup Winnie returns to the institution after a shortlived stay in a nursing home, Bolnick carries us through scene after powerful scene of the humiliations—and occasional triumphs—inside an old-fashioned institution.
Bolnick tells Winnie’s story as Winnie spoke (and wrote): with simple words and sentence structures that are surprisingly effective. She used Winnie’s 20-page first-person account as the building block for this book
Yes, Winnie was frequently hit, deprived of food and sleep, and treated like dirt by some staff. But somehow, in some ways, she still managed to beat the odds and grow up to become a woman who was excited by her first dance, shy with her first boyfriend (from another institution), thrilled with the occasional letters a sister wrote or the Christmas gifts she sent.
-G. Wayne Miller
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer
NY Newsday
Monday, December 2, 1985
Lucid memories of a life spent behind walls
You will love Winnie Sprockett for her honesty, her compassion, her quirky sense of humor. But your heart will ache for the life she led.
Orphaned at 2, Sprockett was placed in foster care along with her three older sisters. A rebellious, developmentally slow child, she acted out her frustrations to a point where, in 1938, when she was 6, her foster mother delivered her to an institution for the mentally retarded. There, except for two brief intervals, she spent the rest of her life.
Some years ago, Jamie Pastor Bolnick, the author of this endearing chronicle, had a summer job in Sprockett’s institution. When she heard that Sprockett had written an autobiography, a penciled narrative that filled 20 pages of a child’s copybook, Bolnick sought her out and persuaded her to be interviewed on tape. She then pieced together Sprockett’s manuscript, the taped interviews and data from the institution’s files.
Written in Sprockett’s voice, with all of her faulty but imaginative grasp of language, this book tells the story of a feisty woman of irrepressible spirit. It is sad that Sprockett, who died in 1976, did not live to see her “book” published, because that is what she passionately wanted. “The reason I wrote a book is ’cause of Willy,” she explains. “He’s my sister’s husband. He said I was mentally retarded. Then I said to myself, I’m gonna set down and write a book. ’Cause mentally retarded people can’t write books, so I’ll show Willy.’ ”
She showed him, all right. “God give me a good memory” was the opening sentence in her copybook. She remembered everything about the day her foster mother brought her to the institution, how she was given a bath in the same water other children had bathed in, how her hair was trimmed so short that her ears stuck out, how the noise in the dormitory kept her awake. “The girls screamed in their sleep, the girls called for their mommys, sometimes they banged their heads... [One] was on the floor, she was rolling and screaming and making animal kind of noises.”
Among her most poignant memories were the visiting days. She describes the triumphant behavior of the girls whose parents came to bring them gifts, the heartbreak of those for whom no one came. The bed next to hers was occupied by Ruby Rose, whose mother had brought her a doll. “That doll even got teeths, and a big smile, and all them curls of hair. I didn’t like it that she had that doll, and that her mother come, and no one come to take me home, no one give me nothing... So I smacked her.” Mrs. Spencer, one of the cottage attendants, promptly gave Sprockett a beating: “Even my mother never smacked me so long.”
Not all the attendants were like Mrs. Spencer. There was a Mrs. Drake, who taught Sprockett to ride a tricycle and to brush her teeth. Kindest of all was Mrs. Knopf, the teacher, who told Sprockett she was smart enough to learn to reed and write if she worked hard. It was all the encouragement she needed. When the day came she could print her name, “I felt so big, I felt so smart. I felt like I wasn’t even retarded at all.”
One of the most touching parts of Sprockett’s story is her relationship with Jeannie, a severely retarded “low-grade.” Mrs. McKenna, Jeannie’s mother, came every visiting day to push her around in a wheelchair as Sprockett watched longingly. “She was smiling and singing to Jeannie, and Jeannie was waving her little arms and laughing, act just like a baby.” When Mrs. McKenna learned that Sprockett never had visitors, she obtained permission to have her accompany Jeannie on a Christmas home visit. Sprockett was enchanted by the luxurious home and thrilled with her gift, a pretty dress. She tried it on. “I went to the mirror and looked in. Looked and looked and looked, but it didn’t matter how hard I looked, I didn’t see nobody pretty. Only thing I seen pretty was that dress. I looked like a dumb skinny kid, I did. With dumb hair… And big ears sticking out…”
It was that pretty dress that precipitated one of Sprockett’s most traumatic experiences. Back in the institution, she refused to put it on, saying it needed to be washed. This infuriated her nemesis, Mrs. Spencer, who proceeded to tie her up in a straitjacket and then, to silence her hysterical screams, put a wet pillow over her face. Sprockett passed out. “For a long time after that I wouldn’t use a pillow,” she wrote.
At age 20, Sprockett was doing fourth-grade work and had become an avid reader. “It gave me such joy to read, like the book was talking to me. And I could hear what it was saying…”
After 25 years in the institution, Sprockett was deemed ready to try community living in a nursing home. She enjoyed the freedom of going to the stores and the public library. But she was turned down by every merchant she asked for a job and was often the target of ridicule.
Restive, she reverted to the hoydenish behavior that was her way of establishing an identity. Her social worker gave her the choice of remaining or returning to the institution. She chose to return. “The institution raised me up, the institution is my home,” she reasoned. It was a place where she had friends, where she could be a friend.
We learn from the author’s epilogue that Sprockett failed at a subsequent nursing-home placement. Though she had the intelligence to function in the community (her IQ was 69), it was just too late for her; she was thoroughly institutionalized. In another sense, it was also too early; the system of placing mentally retarded adults in group homes had not yet gotten under way.
But Winnie Sprockett wanted more than anything to be somebody special. And she most certainly was.
-Frances A. Koestler
Frances A. Koestler, author of “The Unseen Minority,” received this year’s Francis Joseph Campbell Medal from the American Library Association for contributions to reading for the blind and handicapped
January 20, 1986
‘Winnie’ opens rare window into walled world
When Gwynna Sprockett was 6 years old. she lost her name, her family and her freedom. An admitting clerk assumed that “Winnie” was short for Winifred, and it was many years before the girl, now grown up, discovered her true name.
It also was many years before she again saw her foster parents—“the parents the state give me”—or her two natural sisters.
She was committed to a state institution set up for the “feeble-minded and incorrigible.” The year was 1938; and mainstreaming, special education classes in local school districts, and community-based group homes were all in the future. Routinely, the mentally retarded were incarcerated in large institutions, from which adaptation to the outside world became, for many, impossible.
Except for two spells outside—in nursing homes, the only alternative then available to her—she lived all but her last six years in the same institution from which at age 6 she had yearned for release.
But whatever else she lost, Winnie never lost her spirit. With an IQ of 65—about the level of a 9-year-old child—she came to accept the institution because it was a place “like being away at a college,” she thought, where she could learn. She struggled to speak more understandably, so the other children wouldn’t laugh at her, and to learn to read. Later, when the husband of her sister, Miriam, called Winnie retarded, Winnie defiantly wrote a “book” to prove him wrong.
Her 20-page manuscript won great interest from members of the institution’s staff, and for a time they even talked of publishing it in a psychiatric journal. That plan faded. but the idea had taken root in Winnie’s mind.
Enter Jamie Pastor Bolnick. Working one summer at the institution, Bolnick remembered Winnie from her own childhood, when she used to ride past its gates on her bicycle and stop and chat with some of the inmates. When Winnie now asked her help in publishing her book, Bolnick was startled and a little amused. But she began to consider it.
“Winnie: My Life in the Institution” is the fruit of Bolnick’s many taped interviews with Winnie, edited and rearranged, with the original document as the seed at the center. It is, as Bolnick writes, “Winnie’s voice and Winnie’s story.”
And a unique voice it is—strong and clear: Her tale of learning at long last to read seems to echo Helen Keller’s flashing discovery of language with her hand under the water pump and Ann Sullivan signing the word for water into her palm.
“I start in to read and guess what, I kept going. It was coming easy. Told about these little kids—they was Dick and Jane and Sally—and all the adventures they get in. And I’m just going along, went right through two stories and then I stop and say wait a minute, I’m reading.”
She runs to read stories aloud to everyone who will listen, and sleeps that night with the book under her bed, so she can find it first thing in the morning. “It give me such joy to read,” she says, “like the book was talking to me and I could hear what it was saying.”
It is a pity Bolnick did not provide Winnie’s own writing in an appendix, or a sample of an interview transcript, to let the reader judge how true the book is to Winnie’s own expression.
That aside, the book compels belief with its distinctive voice and force of character. Oddly, it is not depressing, despite episodes of endured cruelty or the stunting and constriction of her life. (Bolnick even casts doubt on whether Winnie was actually clinically retarded or whether her condition was a product of her deprived childhood.)
But let Winnie tell it: “My book proves how much I know, proves how smart I am. And anyone who reads my book is gonna say, ‘Who is this girl? She sure isn’t mentally retarded.’ ”
Who is this girl? The book opens a rare window into her world.
-Pat Jeffries
The Oregonian staff
Official Publication of the Association for
Retarded Citizens of the United States
Volume 35, Number 1, Winter/Spring 1986
“Winnie’s book” joy to read
“My book proves how much I know, proves how smart I am. And anyone who reads the book is gonna say, ‘Who is this girl? She sure isn’t mentally retarded!’
“Now I’m even glad Willy called me retarded. The big mouth. He made me write my book.”
– Gwynna “Winnie” Sprockett
Gwynna Sprockett was placed in an institution by her foster parents when she was six. What becomes painfully clear as you read Winnie’s original preface is that an institution was the last place she belonged. But there she lived and there she died 31 years later.
Winnie’s book originally was little more than 20 longhand-written pages in a black copybook. Author Jamie Pastor Bolnick expanded Winnie’s work based on months of taped interviews. To verify Winnie’s many stories and dates, Bolnick also interviewed institution personnel and social workers who had dealt with Winnie.
What results is a moving, yet delightful first person account of Winnie’s life in an institution. The word delightful may seem out of place, but despite the feelings of loneliness and abandonment that Winnie felt, she always kept an incredible optimism, sense of humor and determination. That perspective was Winnie’s most amazing virtue.
The sadness you feel as you read “Winnie” isn’t so much a sadness for the trials she went through, but for the opportunity that was lost—the opportunity for a rich and feisty personality to be free and contribute to society.
It was determined that Winnie had an IQ of 65 and, according to Bolnick, her retardation was the result of an extremely deprived childhood.
The author was 12 when she first met Winnie, talking to her and other clients over a hedge that ringed the institution in which they lived. Eventually, Bolnick moved away and it wasn’t until 15 years tater that she met Winnie again and remembered who she was.
By this time, Winnie’s 20-page book had become known among the institution’s staff. One of the institution’s psychiatrists had used it in a lecture and it had been duplicated for social work graduate students in the local university.
Winnie’s greatest dream was that her book be published. She asked everyone she met if they could help her do that. When she met Bolnick again she didn’t hesitate to ask her, too.
Winnie’s view of the institution changed with time. She eventually came to compare it to a college saying, “I’m here to learn stuff.”
Learning to read and write were two of her aspirations. She felt it would prove to her family—to the world—that she wasn’t “stupid,” just a little slower.
Winnie always claimed that her real mother (her parents died when she was a baby) would have never put her away. Most probably she was right. Fortunately for all of us Winnie never lost her dreams and because of those dreams she pushed herself to learn.
Her greatest gift is the book she, with Bolnick’s help, left us and the hope it holds for people with mental retardation to someday fulfill her longing for freedom.
Put simply, it is a joy to read, walking a delicate line between poignancy and humor.
-Dick Collier
March 1986
In a poignant and often humorous way, this book breathes the life and times of a woman dubbed mentally retarded who, in her own words, tells of her enforced placement in an institution by foster parents, and subsequent experiences in nursing homes where she was farmed out to make room for others in the unnamed institution.
Jamie Pastor Bolnick, a free-lance writer, first met Winnie when she was twelve years old and Winnie was twenty. Fifteen years later, she came back to the institution where she used to visit Winnie, as a summertime recreation worker. She read a twenty-page book of Winnie’s, “My Life in the Institution,” and subsequently using a portable tape recorder, captured the full essence of one who was probably only mildly retarded but had been committed by her foster parents’ decision (her natural parents had died).
Mrs. Bolnick in her epilogue says there was “... a very big question whether Winnie had been clinically retarded.” Evidence indicates her retardation was functional, “a classic example of an extremely deprived childhood.” Today, she would have prospered in a group home. Winnie’s honest statement, beyond engaging sensitivity and understanding, causes one to alternately laugh and shed a tear. The author has captured Winnie’s wealth of experience, arranging and editing it so that it always remains her words, voice and story. The hours spent reading her will provide valuable insights for parents, human services workers or just someone who likes a good story. Winnie’s is it.
-Harry Kamish