Barbara Holland, Defender of Small Vices, Dies at 77

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: September 13, 2010

Barbara Holland, a writer whose humorous essays sang the simple pleasures of drinking martinis, cursing and eating fatty foods, and who wrote an evocative best-selling memoir of her childhood and adolescence in the Washington suburbs, died on Sept. 7 at her home in Bluemont, Va. She was 77.

The cause was lung cancer, her daughter, Emily Brewton Schilling, said.

In her essay collection “Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences” (1995), Ms. Holland put forward a hedonist’s credo.

“Joy has been leaking out of our life,” she wrote. “We have let the new Puritans take over, spreading a layer of foreboding across the land until even ignorant small children rarely laugh anymore. Pain has become nobler than pleasure; work, however foolish or futile, nobler than play; and denying ourselves even the most harmless delights marks the suitably somber outlook on life.”

She even mounted a defense of smoking, which, along with drinking, she identified as her principal hobbies. Appalled readers found comfort in her next collection, a celebration of rural life titled “Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: The Case for Cows, Orchards, Bake Sales & Fairs” (1997), but she returned to contrarian form in “The Joy of Drinking” (2007).

“I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym,” she explained to The Washington Post in 2007. “All of a sudden, we’ve got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness. I’m not really in favor of health and fitness.”

Late in her career, she drew on her childhood and youth to write the memoir “When All the World Was Young” (2005), a bittersweet account of growing up in the 1940s and ’50s. Critics responded enthusiastically to her compelling portrait of a sensitive, acutely observant girl desperate to find a place in the world, and the light touch with which she handled dark themes. “Imagine Lauren Bacall narrating ‘Tristram Shandy,’ ” Molly Jong-Fast wrote in The Chicago Tribune.

Barbara Murray was born on April 5, 1933, in Washington and grew up in Chevy Chase, Md., just across the District line.

Her mother, the former Marion Hall, was a Swarthmore graduate who studied law for a year at Columbia but gave up a career to marry and raise five children. She divorced when Barbara was quite young and married Thomas Holland, a lawyer for the Department of Labor.

Barbara loathed her stepfather, and his dark, looming presence inspired her vivid picture of patriarchy’s heavy hand in postwar America. “My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained,” she wrote. “Fathers were angry; it was their job.”

Her mother later wrote best-selling children’s books under the name Marion Holland, including “A Big Ball of String” and “The Secret Horse.” She also passed along a sharp, pithy verbal style. “Any fool can be a Yankees fan,” she once told her daughter. “It takes real talent to be a Senators fan.”

After graduating from high school, and undergoing an illegal abortion that she describes unsparingly in her memoir, Ms. Holland struck out on her own, landing on her feet with a low-level job at Hecht’s department store in Washington. For the first time she enjoyed independence, a cherished state to which she devoted a book, “One’s Company: Reflections on Living Alone” (1992).

While working as an advertising copywriter in Philadelphia, she began contributing short fiction, essays and articles to magazines like McCall’s, Seventeen, Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal.

Her three marriages ended in divorce. Besides her daughter, Emily, of Sarasota, Fla., she is survived by two brothers, Nicholas, of Del Mar, Calif., and Andrew, of Kensington, Md.; two sisters, Judith Holland Clarke of New Hope, Pa., and Rebecca Holland Snyder of Pensacola, Fla.; two sons, Matthew Davis Schilling of Pottstown, Pa., and Benjamin Hall Schilling of Orlando, Fla; and two grandchildren.

Her other books included “Hail to the Chiefs: How to Tell Your Polks From Your Tylers” (1990), “Wasn’t the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon’s Fond Memories” (1999), “They Went Whistling: Women Wayfarers, Warriors, Runaways, and Renegades” (2001) and “Gentlemen’s Blood: A History of Dueling From Swords at Dawn to Pistols at Dusk” (2003). She also wrote the children’s books “The Pony Problem” (1977) and “Prisoners at the Kitchen Table” (1979).

Her fight for ground to stand on as a young woman remained central to her reading of the world. A steady paycheck and self-respect were the keys to her brand of feminism, not the allowance and room of one’s own proposed by Virginia Woolf. “No, Mrs. Woolf,” she wrote in her memoir. “A job, Mrs. Woolf.”