This Is My Life

This is My Life is a delightfully warm autobiography of one of the most popular storytellers in America. It is a partial autobiography in that it concerns only the highlights of Mrs. Bjorn's life from the time she wrote her first best-selling book up to the present.It was an exciting December evening in 1954 when Thyra Bjorn received word that her first book, Papa's Wife, had been accepted for publication. With this dream realized, Mrs. Bjorn was no longer content to remain only a housewife and mother. Although her home and family were always to be the most important things in her life, she enthusiastically began a "second career: She lectured (billed as "the popular Swedish raconteur"); she joined the Frederika Bremer Committee and went abroad with a group of writers and artists; she had an audience with Queen Louise of Sweden (to whom she presented a leather-bound copy of Papa's Wife); and within two years she had started writing Papa's Daughter—destined to be a best seller. This was followed by Mama's Way and Dear Papa.

Mrs. Bjorn's life during these twelve years contained great happiness and great sorrow; she writes of both with charm, dignity, and warm philosophy. The sparkling anecdotal material, the great sense of fun, and the deep religious conviction that distinguish all her books are abundantly present in This is My Life.

Thyra Ferré Bjorn was one of eight children born to a clergyman in Swedish Lapland. In 1924, her father received a call to a Swedish church in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the family came to America. Mrs. Bjorn has two daughters and four grandchildren, and with her husband, Robert J. Bjorn, makes her home in Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

Jacket design by Pat Feder

—from the dust jacket