Excerpt from Class Action by Laura Leedy Gansler, Clara Bingham, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Most people on the Range rarely drove the sixty miles south to Duluth, yet Lois had moved even farther downstate to Minneapolis/St. Paul after she graduated from high school, where she found work as a file clerk at an insurance company. She loved living in Minneapolis, loved how the people in the Cities were open-minded and well educated. But the Cities also brought her trouble. In 1967, a man she met at a party forced her to have sex with him in the backseat of a car. When she went to the police department to report the date rape, she watched as police interrogated another woman so cruelly that Lois walked out the door and never reported the crime. She became pregnant from the rape and bore a son, Gregory, in January 1968. With nowhere else to go, Lois took the baby home and lived with her parents in Babbitt. When Greg was six months old, Lois left him in the care of her parents while she went to secretarial school in Minneapolis, making the 230-mile drive to Babbitt each weekend. After receiving a legal and medical secretarial degree, she took a secretarial job at an insurance company in Minneapolis and brought Greg to the Cities to live with her.

In 1969, Lois discovered that her high school sweetheart was back from Vietnam and living in Minneapolis. They fell in love. After a hard labor with Greg, Lois had been told by her doctor that she had a tilted uterus and could never get pregnant again, but in the winter of 1969, she discovered the doctor was wrong. She and James Larson had made plans to get married, but when Larson learned of her pregnancy, he broke off the relationship. At the hospital Lois decided to name the baby girl Tamara, then she put the child up for adoption. A week after giving the baby up, she visited her at a foster parent's home. The baby was covered in urine and had terrible diaper rash. Overcome with emotion, Lois changed her mind and demanded to keep her daughter. At age twenty-three, she found herself alone with two-year-old Greg and a new baby.

Excerpted from Class Action by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler. Copyright 2002 by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.