A tale of a frontier woman.

Byline: Susan Rife

Lily, born in west Texas in the early years of the 20th century, grew up rough and ready. Nearly uneducated (her father spent her tuition money on two pairs of Great Danes), she was teaching school at tiny towns (and I use the word loosely) in Arizona, 500 miles from the family ranch in New Mexico, at age 15. She learned a kind of self-reliance and personal resilience that few 21st-century Americans have acquired.

Her story, as reimagined by her granddaughter, explains a lot about Jeannette Walls' 2005 memoir, "The Glass Castle," in which she and her siblings live a mid-20th-century version of Lily's life. Walls' mother, Rose Mary, grew up quite …