Dimestore: A Writer's Life

by Lee Smith

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616206468
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	04/04/2017
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	284,745
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.75(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Lee Smith is the author of fourteen novels, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, Saving Grace, and Guests on Earth, as well as four collections of short stories, including Me and My Baby View the Eclipse and News of the Spirit. Her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as a co-winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A retired professor of English at North Carolina State University, she has received an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature.

Table of Contents

Preface: Raised to Leave: Some Thoughts on "Culture" xi

Dimestore 1

Recipe Box 35

Kindly Nervous 41

Lady Lessons 51

Marble Cake and Moonshine 63

Big River 77

On Lou's Porch 87

Lightning Storm 101

Driving Miss Daisy Crazy; or, Losing the Mind of the South 109

Good-bye to the Sunset Man 123

Blue Heaven 137

A Life in Books 157

Angels Passing 183

The Little Locksmith 191

Acknowledgments 201

Editorial Reviews

With restrained prose and charming humor, [Smith] illuminated a way of life that has all but disappeared and explores the impulse to bear witness that underpins the storyteller in all of us.”
—People (Book of the Week)
 
“Smith delivers a memoir that shines with a bright spirit, a generous heart and an entertaining knack for celebrating absurdity. Although DIMESTORE is constructed as a series of personal essays, it presents as full a sense of a life as any traditional narrative.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“…heartwarming… Dimestore shares the habits that may have saved Smith from her own tendency to get too “wrought up,” one of which was to approach storytelling “the way other people write in their journals,” in order to make it through the night. Fiction became her lifelong outlet, a means of sustaining and reaffirming the connection to her work, as well as a way to preserve the rich mountain culture she so loved as a child.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 
“Dimestore may prove to be a work that connects wildly with readers. Because truth is often more powerful than fiction, and because the tale she has actually lived so far to tell is rendered keenly, irrepressibly and without self-pity. Lee Smith, the person, emerges as one of nonfiction’s great protagonists.”
—Raleigh News Observer

“Now, at last, we have Dimestore: A Writer’s Life, a seasoned, open-hearted memoir, taking us from her youth in the coal-mining town of Grundy, Va., through her education at private schools in Richmond and Roanoke, Va., to her life since 1974, first in Chapel Hill married to the poet James Seay, and since 1985, to columnist and literary critic Hal Crowther. Throughout, the memoir shows Smith’s spunk and spirit….  Yes, Lee Smith is a writer, and without that, we probably would not have this engrossing memoir. But at heart, Lee Smith is a woman – openhearted, spirited, humble – and it is those qualities especially that inspire and make us glad as we read.”
—Charlotte Observer
 
“…profoundly readable… Like her novels, Smith’s memoir is intimate, as though writer and reader are sitting together on a front-porch swing. She writes in the rich vernacular of her youth. Smith’s details are so piercingly remembered, so vividly set on the page, that I felt wrapped in a great blanket of familiarity. Her memoir is a warm, poignant read about a lost time and place, a love of books and a celebration of the quirks and oddities of home.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“This memoir is Smith at her finest. There is not one false note in the book. 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.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
 
“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.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Dimestore…is a testament to the power of place. The author of thirteen novels and multiple short story collections, Smith has long brought Appalachia to life for readers, and the book chronicles her own childhood in the coal-mining town of Grundy, Virginia, where she worked as a young girl in her father’s five-and dime, and her path to becoming a writer.”
—Garden Gun
 

From the Publisher

…Smith delivers a memoir that shines with a bright spirit, a generous heart and an entertaining knack for celebrating absurdity. Although Dimestore is constructed as a series of personal essays, it presents as full a sense of a life as any traditional narrative…Smith weaves these memories with a regional accent that's deeply familiar but also hers alone. "We Southerners love a story," she writes in a tone as soft and conspiratorial as that of a neighbor rocking on a porch, "and we will tell you anything."

The New York Times Book Review - Becky Aikman

02/01/2016
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.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/01/2016
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

Library Journal

2015-11-29
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, 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.

Kirkus Reviews