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Summary
Summary
"A memoir that shines with a bright spirit, a generous heart and an entertaining knack for celebrating absurdity." --The New York Times Book Review
"This is Smith at her finest." --Library Journal , starred review
Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith's youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy's dimestore. When she was sent off to college to gain some "culture," she understood that perhaps the richest culture she would ever know was the one she was leaving. Lee Smith's fiction has always lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story.
Dimestore 's fifteen essays are crushingly honest, wise and perceptive, and superbly entertaining. Together, they create an inspiring story of the birth of a writer and a poignant look at a way of life that has all but vanished.
Author Notes
Lee Smith is a novelist, short story writer, and educator. She was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia. Smith attended Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.
In her senior year at Hollins, Smith entered a Book-of-the-Month Club contest, submitting a draft of a novel called The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed. The book, one of 12 entries to receive a fellowship, was published in 1968. Smith wrote reviews for local papers and continued to write short stories. Her first collection of short stories, Cakewalk, was published in 1981.
Smith taught at North Carolina State University. Her novel, Oral History, published in 1983, was a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection. She has received two O. Henry Awards, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Fiction, the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Award, and the Academy Award in Literature presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first work of nonfiction, novelist Smith (Guests on Earth) explores how deep her Appalachian roots go, in this entertaining and poignant collection of Southern memories. Growing up in the isolated coal town of Grundy, Va., Smith's world revolved around her father's general store (the dime store of the title). She played in the rugged mountains that surrounded her home and absorbed the rhythm and cadence of mountain music and mountain-speak. She learned the art of crafting stories from puttering around her father's store, listening to the women who worked there gossip while she invented elaborate stories for all the dolls for sale. In "Recipe Box," Smith remembers her mother, who, even though she lived in Grundy for most of her adult life, was considered an outsider because she came from Virginia's Chincoteague Island. Both Smith's parents suffered from mental illness, which loomed large in Smith's childhood, which she touches on in "Kindly Nervous," and also tragically affected her son, whom she pays tribute to in one of the collection's most moving essays, "Good-bye to the Sunset Man." It's not all serious, though: in "Big River," Smith recounts a momentous raft trip that she and several college friends embark on, a la Huck Finn, down the Mississippi in 1966. Throughout it all, Smith weaves in her candid observations on the changing South and how she developed into a Southern writer, spurred on by the likes of Eudora Welty. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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 householdand Smith herselfmanaged to stay whole thanks to the intervention of dear friends. Eventually, the author left Grundy for Hollins College, where she wrote "relentlessly sensational" fiction that deliberately avoided all references to her hometown. Only after attending a reading by Eudora Welty, a woman who "hadn't been anywhere much either," did Smith realize that the best stories truly did come from what she knew rather than from her fantasies. In her professional life as a writer, which eventually took her to an academic position at North Carolina State University, Smith learned yet another important lesson, this time from a palsied and eccentric creative writing student name Lou Crabtree. Unschooled as she was, Lou's work evoked "a primal world of river hills and deep forest, of men and women and children as elemental as nature itself, of talking animals and ghosts, witchcraft and holiness," and made Smith love and appreciate her "hillbilly" background more than she ever imagined. Candid and unsentimental, Smith's book sheds light on her beginnings as writer while revealing her resilience and personal transformations over the course of a remarkable lifetime. A warm, poignant memoir from a reliably smooth voice. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
There are authors one reads when one wants to escape to a certain time and place such as Richard Russo's Mohawk Valley or Pat Conroy's Low Country. Loyal readers have come to know Smith's (Guests on Earth, 2013) beloved Appalachian Mountains like the backs of their hands, through novels and short stories that reveal the lives of their characters by the way they move through this rough-and-tumble, mystical world. One might have inferred that their stories are Smith's, too, and now she confirms just how much these mountains and hollers influenced her, in personal essays that look back to a time when life in Grundy, Virginia, was sweet and simple, bewildering and bizarre. Recounting how she was able to observe the townspeople from the office in her father's dime store, Smith is crystal clear on how and why she became an author as she watched the preachers and coal miners, truckers and housewives cope with a landscape that was changing in unimaginable ways. In this candid, wistful, appreciative, and beguiling memoir, Smith offers a distinctive and intimate look at one writer's beginnings.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BLACK HOLE BLUES: And Other Songs From Outer Space, byJanna Levin. (Anchor, $16.) Levin tells the story of gravitational waves - "ripples" in the fabric of space-time first theorized by Einstein - and the scientists who built a machine to detect them nearly 100 years later. The collision of two black holes in 2015 allowed researchers to record the first sounds from space, concluding a 50-year experiment. MY STRUGGLE, BOOK 5: Some Rain Must Fall, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) In my struggle 14 years that this volume karl ove spans, the one constant is Knausgaard's drive for literary success; the book, the penultimate installment of his autobiographical work, follows him from age 19 through the end of his first marriage, and sees him enter a prestigious writing program and secure a book deal. IN PRAISE OF FORGETTING: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, by David Rieff. (Yale University, $16.) Rieff, who as a journalist witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the Bosnian war, outlines a humane case against memorializing tragedies. Rather than helping people to heal, he argues, collective memories can often stoke generational hatred; common defenses of public memorials, such as the hope of preventing future atrocities, are naive. RAZOR GIRL, by Carl Hiaasen. (Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard, $15.95.) A cast of comic, only-in-Florida characters carry out this novel's elaborate farce: Lane, a Hollywood agent kidnapped in error after a fender-bender; his client, the star of a lowbrow reality show; and the woman of the title, who takes Lane hostage. Hiaasen's prose helps to keep "everything at the right temperature," our reviewer, Terrence Rafferty, wrote. "In Florida, you have to know how to stay cool." DIMESTORE: A Writer's Life, by Lee Smith. (Algonquin, $15.95.) This collection of autobiographical essays sketches out the Appalachian coal-mining town in Virginia where Smith grew up - before Walmart arrived, her father's store was demolished or country became cool. One thing about the South that will never change? "We Southerners love a story," Smith writes, "and we will tell you anything." HOMEGOING, by Yaa Gyasi. (Vintage, $16.) Starting in 18th-century Ghana, the lineages of two half sisters - one married to a white man and living in comfort, the other sold into slavery - unfold in Africa and the United States. Our reviewer, Isabel Wilkerson, said the novel offers what "enslavement denied its descendants: the possibility of imagining the connection between the broken threads of their origins."
Library Journal Review
This memoir is Smith (Fair and Tender Ladies; Oral History) at her finest. There is not one false note in the book. Born and raised in Grundy, WV, Smith understood at an early age that her parents-her father owned and ran the town's dimestore, and her mother was considered a stranger to townfolks even though she lived there almost 50 years-were preparing her to leave the coal mining town. She was encouraged to read, discouraged from tomboyish activities, and sent to visit her relatives in Birmingham to learn how to be a lady. VERDICT This wonderful memoir-filled with tenderness, compassion, love, and humor-is highly recommended for fans of Smith's fiction, lovers of Southern writing, and readers who are interested in the changes in small-town America.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface: Raised to Leave: Some Thoughts on "Culture" | p. xi |
| Dimestore | p. 1 |
| Recipe Box | p. 35 |
| Kindly Nervous | p. 41 |
| Lady Lessons | p. 51 |
| Marble Cake and Moonshine | p. 63 |
| Big River | p. 77 |
| On Lou's Porch | p. 87 |
| Lightning Storm | p. 101 |
| Driving Miss Daisy Crazy; or, Losing the Mind of the South | p. 109 |
| Good-bye to the Sunset Man | p. 123 |
| Blue Heaven | p. 137 |
| A Life in Books | p. 157 |
| Angels Passing | p. 183 |
| The Little Locksmith | p. 191 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 201 |