Southern Memories

Life doesn't always go according to plan, a lesson I learned the hard way during my divorce. My first love returns home just in time to watch me pick up the pieces, and the moment I lay eyes on him every memory rushes back. Jayson Lincoln, the man who still makes my heart beat fast, after all these years. But he's Doctor Lincoln now and I'm a far cry from the carefree girl he left behind. I'm learning to navigate life as a single mother of twin girls and he's reluctantly home to take over the family practice. We may be back in the same small town, but we're still worlds apart.

In a trio of popular gender rituals—sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage—young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to "do" white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. Based on ethnographic research and taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation.

Lee Smith is one of today's most critically acclaimed authors writing about contemporary life in the South. In Family Linen, with a remarkable economy of description and dialogue, Smith sketches eccentric, yet familiar characters moving through a family drama that resonates with both tension and humor.

Everyone thinks fourteen-year-old Violet is a murderer. After a summer-night swim with her best friend, Ainsley, Violet is found confused, wandering in the forest - and Ainsley’s never seen again. But without a body, murder charges won’t stick, so Violet is sent away. After more than a decade in a psychiatric ward, Violet returns to her broken-down hometown of Normal, Alabama, to claim her dead mother’s inheritance and help her overworked sister care for their unstable, alcoholic father.

Nowhere are Kathryn Tucker Windham's transcendent themes of community, fidelity, and family more evident than in these stories. The author calls them "recollections of a happy Southern childhood", but her avid admirers would tell you that they are much more than that.