Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays with Story
March 25, 2016
“I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa – where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.” – Alex Haley
A Writer’s Memoir to add to your Reading List
DIMESTORE
A Memoir by Lee Smith
KIRKUS REVIEW
Award-winning novelist Smith (Guests on Earth, 2013, etc.) recalls growing up in a small Virginia coal town and the indelible influence that background had on her adult life.
Situated in the mountains of southwest Virginia, Smith’s hometown of Grundy was beautiful but isolated. The author’s mother, a Virginia East Shore outsider locals called a “foreigner,” was a home economics teacher. Her father, a native son, owned the local dime store, where Smith typed on his typewriter and observed clients and employees from behind a one-way office window. “It was the perfect early education for a fiction writer,” she writes. As passionate as Smith’s mother and father were about each other, they each suffered from periods of the mental illness that would later strike Smith’s son. Yet the family household—and Smith herself—managed to stay whole thanks to the intervention of dear friends. Eventually, the author left Grundy for Hollins College… Read the entire review at https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lee-smith/dimestore/
Tuesdays with Story 