What I’m Reading Now: The Tobacco Wives

Adele Myers’ historical novel is set in 1946 North Carolina where 15–year-old Maddie has been dropped off to stay with her aunt Etta for the summer in Bright Leaf, a town known for growing tobacco and manufacturing cigarettes. Maddie’s aunt makes gowns and dresses for all the local “tobacco wives,” the upper class women married to the big bosses in the tobacco industry.

When her aunt becomes sick soon after Maddie arrives in town, it’s up to Maddie and her assistant, Anthony, to make the season’s dresses. It’s a lot of pressure on the shoulders of the 15-year-old, but she’s been sewing for years and it looks like she’s capable of pulling it off. One thing I like about Maddie is that she’s so independent. She knows she doesn’t want to end up depending on a man the way that her mother depended on her father. The backstory is that Maddie’s father passed away in WWII right before the novel opens. So our heroine is not only missing her absent mother that summer, but she’s also still mourning her father.

When people around Maddie start to become sick, Maddie struggles with exposing the truth about the toxicity of tobacco, especially in an environment where nearly everyone around her depends on the plant to survive.

The prose style is simple and easy to follow. Myers sprinkles in a few old-fashioned expressions and details about the culture of the time. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator did a good job of varying her voice to match the various characters. The story is in first-person in Maddie’s voice. The narrator is expressive enough to keep my attention, and the southern accent is subtle.

March 7, 2022 0

What I’m Reading Now: Picking Cotton

I’d highly recommend Picking Cotton. The story is told in alternate narration between a woman, Jennifer Thompson, and her accused rapist, Ronald Cotton. Jennifer is a twenty-something-year-old college kid in the first chapter. She goes home to her apartment and falls asleep. Later that night, she’s awakened to the sight of a strange man in her bedroom. He holds a knife to her neck and rapes her. Later, she tricks him into letting her go into her kitchen, and she gets a good look at him in bright kitchen light, memorizing his face. Jennifer is lucky enough to run for the back door and take sanctuary at a neighbor’s house. Horrifically, the rapist rapes another woman nearby on that same night.

I won’t spoil the book for you, but I will say there’s a case of mistaken identity in it. I like the alternating narrative style in which the book is written. We also get to follow the story of Jennifer’s convicted rapist and learn what his life was like both before prison and after his conviction. If you’d like to learn more about Jennifer’s and Ronald’s stories, there’s an old 60 minutes interview with both of them. There are spoilers in the interviews, so don’t watch the interview until after reading the book.

September 17, 2021 0

Appalachian Writers’ Workshop

I was honored to serve as a nonfiction teacher at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop (AWW). AWW is held for one week each summer when writers from all over the Appalachian region gather at Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky to study fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I had a blast. I’ve attended one other writers’ workshop as a student, but that workshop felt very large and impersonal in comparison. AWW feels very intimate, though there were probably almost one hundred of us on campus and more than one hundred attending virtually. There were no egos there, and though I had never met any of these writers before, I felt a sense of camaraderie that I have never felt as a student or as a teacher before. Magical place.

I was also given the opportunity to read from one of my essays in front of a live audience. I read with Robert Gipe, who is not only a good writer but also very friendly and personable. Here’s the recording of our reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqFFEwhlLC4

We were treated with readings every night during the week by writers like Annette Clapsaddle, Frank X. Walker, Leah Hampton, and George Ella Lyon, just to name a few. Our keynote speaker was Adriana Trigiani, a writer whose work I’ve been reading for years. I love her Big Stone Gap series.

August 15, 2021 0

“Townie” by Neel Patel

“Townie” is a short story by Neel Patel, and I found it on Audible.com. It’s a short listen, less than an hour. The story focuses on two young women who party and socialize together. Our narrator betrays her friend in the end in a memorable and heart-breaking way. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I will say it’s worth a listen.

Patel is also the author of a story collection called, If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi. I have the hardback, and I look forward to reading it at some point.

July 12, 2021 0

What I’m Reading Now: Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey

I’ve taught several of Trethewey’s poems in my literature classes. She’s definitely known more for poetry than nonfiction. This book, Memorial Drive is a memoir. I’m halfway through the audiobook, which is narrated by the author.

Trethewey was born to a white father and black mother in 1966. It was illegal for her parents to marry in Mississippi at that time. In her poetry, she often writes about being mixed race in the South. She definitely discusses Southern race relations in this story, but the real focus of it is on bearing witness to violence, her mother’s murder, and the impact it left on the author. This is a heartbreaking book and definitely worth a read. Just beware of the violent subject matter.

One thing I really like about this book is Trethewey’s penchant for taking tiny parts of her lived experiences and using them to help the reader understand her mindset at the time. For instance, she writes about being driven around the I-285 bypass in Atlanta by her mother’s boyfriend. In so few words, Trethewey clearly communicates how unsafe she felt with him and how powerless she was to do anything about it. She even mentions how triggering I-285 is for her years later when she returns to Atlanta. I could really understand her there. There are particular places that hold a lot of meaning for me and just visiting them can change my mood. I’m sure this is true for everyone.

Trethewey also writes in the second person in several sections of the book. At first, it gave me the feeling that she wants to sound detached in those moments. She even calls herself out for it midway through the book by saying that writing in second person is an attempt to distance herself from the girl who experienced these traumas. Still, I think it goes beyond that. The use of the second person creates a more personal reading experience. It connects with readers by making Trethewey’s story a shared experience with readers who’ve suffered similar traumas. By addressing the reader as “you,” she emphasizes that she’s not alone, that many of us also witnessed childhood trauma and still struggle to cope with it.

July 9, 2021 0

What I’m Reading Now: Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez

I’m a discriminatory reader who will try a story or two and give up if I don’t like them. However, Enriquez got my attention by starting strong. “The Dirty Kid,” the first story in her collection, focuses on a young woman living in a crime-ridden city in Argentina. She’s privileged and lives in a nice home, but she’s a daily witness to the poverty and crime around her. The woman helps a dirty boy who lives on the streets with his drug addict mother. Later, when she doesn’t see the boy and hears news about a young boy recently decapitated, she sets out walking to find the boy and his mother. I haven’t listened to the other stories yet, though I’ve previewed a few of them. Make no mistake: this is a violent collection, so it’s not for those who can’t handle violence or the macabre. Still, I’m looking forward to trying the other stories. The book is a translated audiobook. Ms. Enriquez is from Argentina.

July 7, 2021 0

How Y’all Doing? By Leslie Jordan

Leslie Jordan is an actor from Chattanooga who has appeared in many well-known television series and films, such as Will and Grace, American Horror Story, and The Help. I first began to notice him last year during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when he went viral on Instagram for posting his hilarious short videos:

His audiobook, How Y’all Doing? is just as hilarious as I expected, but it’s also a sweet and personable memoir in which he discusses his time working on a horse farm, his early days in Hollywood as an actor looking to scratch out a place for himself, and some of his most memorable film roles.

I read quite a lot of memoirs, and I think the best ones are honest and don’t try to paint the author in the best light. Jordan is honest about his self-centered nature, how much he craves the spotlight, and even reveals that he once had a drinking problem (though he doesn’t depress the reader with all the details). This memoir isn’t for those looking for a layered or deeply meaningful story, but it was just right for me this past weekend when I needed some laughs, and so I found myself returning to it until I’d gobbled it all up.

July 5, 2021 0

What I’m Reading Now: The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner

The Nature of Fragile Things is available on my library app. Susan Meissner has written more than a dozen books, but this is the first of hers that I’ve read. I’m about a 1/3 of the way through the audiobook and I’m enjoying it so far. It starts a little slow, which is normally something that I dislike, but I keep reading because the author does a good job of making me curious about the family relationships in this story. It begins with Sophie, an Irish immigrant living in New York who answers an ad for a mail order bride. She moves to San Francisco to meet her match, a widowed man who has a five-year-old daughter. The setup reminded me a lot of The Magic of Ordinary Days because both novels focus on the marriage of two strangers. The setup is a good one, too, because as readers we wonder what sort of strife this arranged marriage will create. Will she be attracted to her husband? Will he treat her cruelly?

These basic questions are answered right away. Her husband is an attractive man who owns a comfortable home and lets her mother his daughter in basically whatever way she pleases. Still, you can’t help but sense that something is awry with Sophie’s husband. He shows no affection for her, which isn’t that unusual sense they’re strangers, but he also shows no affection for his daughter either, not even so much as a hug or a kiss. The husband goes out of town on business and gives vague answers to questions about where he’s going, what he does, and when exactly he’ll return.

One day, a mysterious woman shows up at Sophie’s house while her husband is out of town. The woman gives Sophie some shocking news that changes the entire family dynamic and what both women think of Sophie’s husband. I won’t spoil it for you here, but that chapter really shocked me and made me sit up and pay attention.

The other thing to know about this one is that the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 is a key event in the story. I haven’t reached the earthquake part of the book yet, but I can clearly see that Meissner is dropping breadcrumbs to help the reader piece together a family mystery while we’re also anticipating the catastrophic earthquake. I love when an author complicates things with the emergence of several high stakes problems to solve at once.

This is exactly my type of book. I enjoy historicals and stories that focus on family strife. I’m also enjoying the lovely performance of the narrator who voices Sophie’s Irish accent. Looking forward to finishing this one!

July 2, 2021 0

All We Ever Wanted by Emily Giffin

This was my introduction to Ms. Griffin’s work, and I am pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed most of this one. Usually I think books with trite titles will be predictable and/or saccharine sweet, but this one has well-developed characters and a believable twist near the end (though what happens at the very end is maddening, but feels true).

The author has also written some chick lit/love stories, though I think this book leans toward the shelves in the bookstore that just say, “fiction.” In a nutshell, the story focuses on two families—one lower middle-class and the other upper class. The wealthy son of one family attends private school with the middle-class daughter of the other family. At a party one night, the middle-class daughter, Lila, gets drunk and wakes the next day to learn that Finch, the rich kid, has a photo of her on his phone. The photo has been circulated around to nearly everyone at their prep school, and it shows her lying around semi-conscious with her boob out. There’s a racist caption attached to the pic that says something about her getting her green card (She’s part Brazilian).

The son tries to downplay the incident, and his father does the same. The mother, Nina, is the only one of the three of them who is appropriately appalled. The dad even goes so far as to attempt to pay the girl’s father off with $15,000 because he’s afraid his son will be kicked out of school and lose his place in the Ivy League.

One thing I enjoyed about the book was the subject matter. It feels all too familiar and real. I don’t like where the story took Finch, but I won’t spoil that for you here. I do like that the story is told in first person from three different narrators: Nina, Lila, and Tom (Lila’s dad). The voices are pretty distinct, and I enjoyed putting myself in each of the character’s shoes. For instance, what would I do if Lila were my daughter? How would I react at the end if Finch were my son?

I will look for more of Emily Giffin’s books.

May 3, 2021 0

Tennessee R.E.A.D.S.

After my previous library cancelled their subscription to RB Digital, I searched for a new audiobook app to replace it. Thanks to the library here in Putnam County, Tennessee, I was able to get a free subscription to Tennessee R.E.A.D.S., (AKA Regional E-book and Audiobook Download System) which has an app called Libby that allows library patrons to check out e-books and audiobooks. This service is not limited to Tennessee book lovers either. Check to see which reading apps are available from your local library.

The books available on Libby can be borrowed for two weeks at a time. I believe there’s a limit to how many books you can borrow at once, and I think it’s a pretty high number, something like 15-20. I also subscribe to Audible, which costs me about $25 monthly for two books plus discounts on thousands of others. However, I usually check Libby and Hoopla to see which books I can borrow for free before I buy an Audible.com book. This allows me to support my book habit without putting a strain on my finances.

Happy reading!

March 12, 2021 0