Sometimes you have to leave a place in order to appreciate it.
Such was the case for Frances Mayes,
who charts and examines her formative years before she wrote her blockbuster
memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun. As a child, Mayes
longed to escape her hometown of Fitzgerald, Georgia; she lived most of her
adult life in Italy and California. But a trip to Oxford, Mississippi, for a
book signing served as a conversion moment for Mayes. She and her husband
relocated to Hillsborough,
North Carolina, a small, historical enclave on the Eno River where many writers and artists
reside.
"Often, seemingly spontaneous acts come from a deep,
unacknowledged place," Mayes writes in Under
Magnolia: A Southern Memoir, as she re-imagines and re-creates the
solitary, bookish, willful childhood she had in the pre-civil rights South.
Mayes's unhurried, stream-of-consciousness narrative provides an intimate look
into her upbringing, an "intense microcosm" of family, friends and a
home where pride seemed to prevail over realism.
"Secretive, inverted things informed my childhood,"
writes Mayes, as she
traces the complex connections of a small town. She renders the trajectory of
her life story—the people and the places she's fled—via pivotal scenes infused
with colorful characters and sensory imagery. In describing one of the first
funerals she ever attended, Mayes
writes, "The smell of roses feels so heavy it's as if we've stepped inside
a flower. Pink shades on hanging lamps make the room glow like inside a
shell." Such vivid, poetic prose serves to enhance the bittersweet journey
of a natural-born storyteller who rediscovers and reclaims her Southern roots.
Publication Date: April 1,
2014
Note: This review is a
reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission
of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (4/11/14),
click HERE