Getting Mother's Body

Within the tradition of the great African-American women novelists, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks blazes her own trail. Parks tells the story of Billy Beede, a woman who has been impregnated by a bigamist coffin salesman, who sets out on a quest with her relatives to dig up her mother's body in La Junta, Arizona. Her mother's last wish was that she be buried with all her best jewelry, and Billy wants to rob the grave to help pay for future expenses. On the way, she and her relatives are plagued by the racist prejudices of the 1960s South - where a couple of the Beedes spend the night in jail though they have committed no offense. This surreal narrative makes for an original and unsettling book.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Unlike As I Lay Dying, which really does read like a dream -- and not a good one, either -- Getting Mother's Body is a straightforward, light-footed novel with none of the bleak, doomy undertones of Faulkner's; it's just about as funny and not nearly as scary. — Laura Miller

Pearl Cleage, author of the Oprah favorite What Looks like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, praised Suzan-Lori Parks and her debut novel, Getting Mother's Body: "With a playwright s ear, a novelist s eye, and a passionate appreciation for the complex magic of everyday women, Suzan-Lori Parks spins a story whose characters are as mysterious and sexy as lace curtains billowing at the bedroom window."