| Summary: | "Mary Beth Rogers is the only person in the past thirty years to have run a successful statewide campaign to put a Democrat in the Texas Governor's Office. That candidate was Ann Richards, and Rogers served as Chief of Staff for Governor Richards during the first 18 months of her term. But Rogers's road to political success was complex, with threads of public life, private family life, and an interior secret life of rambling thoughts, incoherent yearnings, and spiritual unease. In her memoir, Rogers connects her Sicilian ancestry and Texas roots and life through the metaphor of the well, which can variably be a source of nourishing cool waters, a rocky and gritty place where snakes settle, and a site of change as water becomes stale and muddy. Rogers allows the threads of her life to emerge and explores what fulfills her, what troubles her, and what drew her to the well of Texas politics, where the deeper she looked, the more she learned. Candid and vulnerable, Rogers opens up about navigating experiences like being a mother at a time when the path to professional work wasn't always clear, being a liberal feminist politician in a conservative state, and the pain of the sudden death of her husband. The memoir frames each chapter around a personal vignette, and chapters unfold around loose themes. As Rogers explains, "I have organized my personal experiences into a series of topical reflections that contain some of the political stories that most affected me. These stories are not necessarily in chronological order, in the way that a more traditional memoir might be organized. They are simply the ones that have been pushed full force into my late-life orbit of awareness.""--
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