Early Life
Mary Elizabeth Annia, the daughter of Mary Elizabeth Thweatt Anania (1923–2012) and Vincent Anania (1920–2008), grew up in a military family, moving many times and never having a hometown. Her father, a United States Navy pilot, was transferred from military base to military base during her childhood and adolescence; for part of her childhood, she lived in Japan, where her father was stationed. She relates in her book Saving Graces that one of the difficult relocations that she went through was moving during her senior year of high school. Some of her childhood friends' fathers were killed in war and Edwards relates childhood memories of attending their funerals. She also relates the stress of living at a military base with hospital facilities that handled a constant stream of wounded soldiers while her father was away fighting in Vietnam.
Edwards had two younger siblings: a brother, Jay Anania, a professor of film at New York University and a sister, Nancy Anania. Edwards graduated from the Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Virginia, then attended Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where she earned a Bachelor's degree. After three years of postgraduate studies in English, she entered UNC's School of Law and earned a Juris Doctor.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Edwards
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)