Family Memoirs & Histories, West Virginia - State & Local History, Regional Studies - Northeast & Middle Atlantic U.S., U.S. Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography, Women's Biography - General & Miscellaneous, Extended Family Members - Biography

Addie: A Memoir

Name: Addie: A Memoir
Author: Mary Lee Settle
ISBN: 9781570032844

by Mary Lee Settle

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Overview

An autobiography that begins with one's birth begins too late...So begins Mary Lee Settle's stunning memoir, which interweaves her own life with those of her grandmother and other family members to create a colorful quilt of West Virginia life that spans more than a century. One of the most respected Southern writers of our age, Mary Lee Settle offers us a glimpse of American history--through the eyes of one fascinating family.

"A classic American memoir...to love as well as to read, a book to pass from hand to hand, generation to generation." --Boston Globe

"Settle has preserved for us a moment in the South's history palpable as the trumpet vines and rocking chairs of a long-departed front-porch afternoon." --New York Times Book Review

Mary Lee Settle, author of the Beulah Quintet and many other works of fiction, won the National Book Award for her novel Blood Tie, and her most recent novel, Choices, was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year. She has received an Award for Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and awards from the Southern Regional Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Merrill Foundation. She is also the founder of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Synopsis

Angeline Goreau

There is . . .plenty of abuse and betrayal, scandal, failed love, disappointed expectation. . . .Settle has preserved for us a moment in the South's history palpable as . . .a long departed front porch afternoon. -- New York Times Book Review

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Editorials

Angeline Goreau

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Settle's warm, rich, colorful multigenerational family saga encompasses her great-grandparents' fortune in land, slaves, livestock, coal mines, salt works; her roots in West Virginia's Kanawha River Valley, pioneers' gateway to Kentucky bluegrass country; racial tensions, wars with Indians, the Civil War's legacy--themes and events that have shaped her fiction, notably the epic Beulah Quintet. Two sharply contrasting women dominate: the author's genteel mother, a fiercely determined suffragist, frustrated poet and Southern Democrat in a Republican household, who believed that whites ought to be "responsible for `colored' people," and Settle's emotional, feisty maternal grandmother, Addie, a Church of God Holy Roller who scorned her relatives' "cold-blooded, straight-backed Presbyterianism." It was Addie who told Settle about her encounters with ghosts, who took her to a tent revival meeting to heal her eye trouble, who introduced her to a world of myth and poetry that would fuel the Beulah saga. Settle, whose peripatetic girlhood bounced from West Virginia to Kentucky, Florida and Charleston, sometimes romanticizes her family and the South. Yet her incisive account of coming to terms with her family's mixed legacy is shot through with wit, grace and rueful irony, and is punctuated by personal tragedies--an uncle's suicide, another uncle's brutal murder, her grandfather's death under the wheels of a train. Her mellifluous prose and her novelist's gift for setting scenes and delineating characters keeps this memoir flowing like a clear mountain spring. 32 halftones. (Oct.)

Booknews

Settle, a novelist, tells of her family's origins in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, recording the expectations, talents, and tragedies of a people and a place that would serve as her subject in her novel . No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

Kirkus Reviews

Addie's granddaughter, the author, is the real subject here, in a delicate exploration of growing up that gives weight to the land, to the economy, to the river, and most of all, of course, to complex family relationships. 'An autobiography that begins with one's birth begins too late,' says the author, because all the forces that will shape you, cosmic or human, are already in place at the moment of birth. So Settle (Choices, 1995; Charley Bland, 1989), winner of a National Book Award, lets her autobiography become a memoir of her maternal grandmother, Addie, and of the family homestead in West Virginia that was paid for by salt mines and coal mines. Addie came to the homestead by way of a first marriage that produced three daughters and three attempts at suicide on her part. She was rescued—at one point literally carried off when her husband tried to kill her—by the man who owned the homestead, the man who was her lover and by whom she was already pregnant with Settle's mother. Having obtained a divorce, Addie took charge of her new home, of her beloved second husband, and of the little land that had not already been leased to the coal companies. There were family tragedies: Addie's oldest daughter, Minnie, was a morphine addict, so adept that she could 'drive the hypodermic through her dress as she sat beating egg whites.'; the husband let himself be run over by a train, although Addie would never concede suicide. Politics also becomes personal: Mother Jones, the almost mythical labor organizer, is a real person here, proselytizing the coal miners of the Kanawha Valley. Addie, at some risk, loaned her a field to hold her meeting. Addie, her childrenand grandchildren, her in-laws and outlaws (the paternal side of the family) are all aspects of the child, the adult, the novelist that Mary Lee Settle became. The author captures them in a kind of chorus of life and death that has now set her free.