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…
There is something special about a Southern Mama. I used to explain it by saying I moved to Alabama because, “I married a Southern Boy. And Southern Boys don’t get too far away from their mamas.” That usually got a laugh because, on one level, it’s true. Southern mothers are strong women and their children respond to that strength. These women have raised generations of kids who know Mama is stronger than anyone except Grandma or God Almighty. Dads are dads and everyone should have a good one but no one’s more certain than Mom. That standard was true of my southern mother-in-law and it is certainly true about Rick Bragg’s mother. In All Over But the Shoutin‘, his mom is the heroine of the story and the center of his life. To hear Rick tell it, life should have been nicer to Margaret Marie Bundrum. Although she was born into a large family in one of the poorer areas of the United States, the country was beautiful, her family was loving and her father provided for them all by building houses and making moonshine. It was a reasonable childhood for that area and at seventeen, Margaret Marie had the…