Pages

Friday, July 8, 2022

Living with Conviction by Toby Dorr (TLC Book Tours)

 


Have you ever made a bad decision?  I think everyone has a decision they regretted making at some point in their life.  For some people, those decisions are so major that they upend their lives.  This is true in the case of Toby Dorr.  Toby was a successful middle-aged mother and wife.  She had started a dog training program in a local prison and became national news when she fell in love with a convict (John Maynard), used a dog crate to help him escape, and ended up on the run.  This book is Toby’s story.

I will admit here, that somehow, I missed this national story in 2007.  That was the year between Kile being born and Daniel being born.  I was pregnant with Daniel and sick with hyperemesis gravidum.  A lot of news slipped by me.  This story was all new to me.  Since I’ve finished the book, I’ve listened to the Dateline Podcast about the case.

Living with Conviction is a powerful memoir that I could not put down.  Toby’s story was riveting.  She told the story starting from the moment her and John crashed and were arrested by police.  She finds herself in jail and grappling with the fact that she will be there for some time, and that her relationships with her family have been altered forever.  In flashbacks, Toby tells the story of the budding relationship of her and John and also the story of her life up to the point.  She was a woman who had accomplished a lot in life and had a husband and two sons.  During her time in prison she started to understand that she had used being busy to hide the emptiness she felt inside.  She was put in charge of her siblings at five years old after her father was in a horrific accident.  Since that time, she always thought she had to take care of everyone and not worry about her own happiness.    While in jail, Toby was able to think through her life and put everything in perspective.

Toby’s story made me realize again how our prison/jail system is broken.  It was odd how they kept transferring her all over. The most disturbing part to me was that the prison and jails seemed to be mostly filled with people who had mental problems and needed help.  The system has just abandoned them to be imprisoned without help.  I was also disturbed that when there were serious medical issues with the prisoners, they were just ignored.  There has to be a better way to do things.

I’d like to think I would be a forgiving person if my friend or relative was in the same situation as Toby.  I was disturbed on how her sisters treated her, and my heart broke for her as a mother when her sons no longer wanted to see her while she was in jail or afterwards.  What was amazing is that her cellmates and friends she made in jail treated her better than many in her own family.  She was able to make real connections with different ladies and form a real sisterhood.  One friend was Lisa Montgomery, the woman who killed another woman to steal the baby still in her womb.  Reading this made Lisa seem a real person to me, someone who was wounded, and not someone just from a headline.  These relationships helped to put Toby back on track with her life.

Favorite Quotes:

“But she is also a daily reminder that none of us is as bad as our worst mistake.”

“My husband didn’t notice ow much Dad’s cancer affected me, but John Maynard did.  He saw right into my soul.  I’d been waiting all my life for someone to see me, to notice me, to love me; John did.”

“Perhaps from a different perspective, Senorita’s story did mimic my own.  It only took one act of desperation to spur the wheels of fate.”

“I learned that grief is neither good nor bad, it just is.  What mattered was how I dealt with it.”

Overall, Living with Conviction is a riveting and moving memoir that I highly recommend.

Book Source:  Review Copy as part of the TLC Book Tour.  Thank-you!  

No comments:

Post a Comment