Helen Bevington passed away in March 2001, a 94-year-old author and poet, who wrote a 1965 memoir, "Charley Smith's Girl," that included details about love affairs in the rural Otsego County town where she grew up. One of these affairs involved her father, Charley, a Methodist minister. The book was controversial enough to be banned in 1965 by the Worcester Free Library. Knowing this, "The Third and Only Way" speaks to the courage of her mother, "who survived without lament", compared to her father, who lived a life of despair. Bevington assures us through her vignettes of uncommon women like Simone de beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Beatrix Potter and many others. She demonstrates there is a third and more hopeful way to live one's life, deviating from that portended by one's family. A compelling read, her lyrical style is mesmerizing and wrought with lots of tabloid details.