Front Door, Back Door

My apartment is on the first floor of a narrow building that was once a grocery store. So narrow, I have two entries with hallways:
a north door, below, where I often sit with my morning coffee. (That's my bike parked on the fence). I'd like to make a little patio of paving stones on the bare dirt...

And the official (mailbox) front door, facing the sunny south:

I'm halfway through reading the book ^ standing on my desk, Pioneer Girl (2014), by Bich Minh Nguyen.
It's good--interesting--about a young woman, Lee, born in the US to parents from Vietnam. Having finished her PhD in English, Lee is back home helping in the family restaurant, searching with no luck for an academic job--she can't even get a position as part-time adjunct faculty.

Through a fluke, Lee starts researching Rose Wilder Lane--the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder who edited and perhaps ghostwrote much of her mother's Little House series Lee grew up reading. She discovers that in 1965--this is fact!--RWL wrote a report for Woman's Day magazine from Vietnam, and this is where Lee imagines their histories intersecting. Was RWL the old, white woman customer of her grandfather's cafe, whom he always told stories about?

I know nothing about Rose Wilder Lane (RWL), and Pioneer Girl makes me curious. The good article "The Other Wilder: Rose Wilder Lane" (by Michael Zimny, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, 2017) quotes RWL writing of her own childhood:

“My father and mother were courageous, even gaily so. They did everything possible to make me happy, and I gaily responded with an effort to persuade them that they were succeeding.
But all unsuspected, I lived through a childhood that was a nightmare.
. . . I hated everything and everybody in my childhood with such bitterness and resentment that I didn’t want to remember anything about it.”

RW Lane became a journalist and traveled widely. What an interesting life! Later, she became a right-wing, Ayn Rand type.
In Vietnam, she saw correctly, "There is something in these people that isn’t explained, something that does not give up, that is not conquered.”
No kidding. However, she foresaw victory for that unrelentingness for the wrong side, the South.

Pioneer Girl isn't just about the search for RWL. Bich Minh Nguyen weaves in Lee's childhood as a child of pioneers of a different sort in the US Midwest.

All of this connects with my childhood, though I'm a generation older than the author. I grew up in Madison, Wisc. during the Sixties, and the Vietnam War was the backdrop of my childhood. I remember the antiwar protests in our streets and the war footage on our little black-and-white TV.

In those years, I read my sister's set of Little House books several times, once when I was sick in bed--because they were there. They must have formed me, and they're are on my list of Children's Books to Reread. Far down the list, though because I didn't love them.
I remember I did love how the LH books were about a girl learning how to make and do things--like The Island of the Blue Dolphins, which I just reread.

Lee writes: the LH books were "a DIY guide to frontier living: how to make butter and cheese from the cow you milked yourself; how to make sausage from the pig you butchered in the yard; how to make a smooth pine floor and door with hinges; how to sew a lady's dress with all the requisite flounces and bustles..."

Maybe there's too much cheerful can-do pluckiness in the Little House books for me though? Is that what I didn't like about them--a preponderance of the sort of can-do individualism that led Rose W Lane to being a libertarian in old age?
Did that ring false to me?

I think maybe so. I liked grimmer stories. (There's no false cheer in Island of the Blue Dolphins, it's almost emotionally flat.) Of the LH series, I liked best The Long Winter, which is the frightening record of a winter when the Ingalls family almost starved to death.
(Similarly in Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series, I liked best the related Emily of Deep Valley. Betsy & Tacy head off to college, and Emily is trapped at home. Though she makes good, it's a much bleaker story.)

The differences are nowhere near this stark, not at all! but I think of how Truman Capote was fascinated by Perry Smith, the murderer In Cold Blood who shared his background but went in a different direction. Capote wrote, "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he stood up and went out the back door, while I went out the front."