My mom used to divide her library into sections. Lots of space was dedicated to fiction and the sturdiest shelves held her coffee-table sized books on the movies. But one special part of the library was devoted to chronicles of everyday life, virtually all of them written by women. Some also wrote Kid Lit. or humor like Jean Kerr and Judith Viorst while others wrote novels or plays but every book on that shelf was what I called a “Domestic Chronicle”; an account of everyday life. If those books sounded boring, they weren’t. All of them were clear-eyed observations on a fascinating, multi-faceted worlds. usually recorded with dry wit. These books had a remarkable effect on the reader. Novels might be read for excitement or entertainment and non-fiction for excitement or knowledge but domestic chronicles could appease the soul. So my question is, where are the books of this genre today? According to my mom, the best writer in this genre was Gladys Taber, author of the Stillmeadow series. In book after book, Ms. Taber recorded life at her New England farmhouse, Stillmeadow. She was not a farmer or a New England Yankee from birth so her stories deal with…
I am not Southern by birth. I was born in north Texas and raised in the west, in spaces known for harsh winds, wide horizons, and voices loud enough to get through the first and reach the second. Because of this I was a stranger in a strange land when I moved to the South and I worried I would always be an outsider. Over several years, I read a barrel load of books on how nuanced, complex and wonderful life here can be here, but no book taught me more or made me feel more at home than Anne Rivers Siddons’s collection of essays, John Chancellor Makes Me Cry. Mrs. Siddons was raised in a small Georgia town and graduated from Auburn before beginning a career in Atlanta, first in advertising and then as a novelist. Between those two jobs came the essay collection in this book. It is a heartfelt account of adjusting to adult life after the raw newness (and gleam) of one’s twenties has disappeared but before the confidence that comes with seniority has set in. In Passages, Gail Sheehy wrote of this as the age when 30-somethings double down on the mortgage/kids/picket fence paradigm and Ms….