Southeastern States - Regional Biography, Regional Studies - Southern U.S., U.S. Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography, Journalists - News & Media Biography, Tennessee - State & Local History, Tennessee - Regional Biography
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Overview
James Conaway knew there was something wrong with his father before he let himself think about it. The signs were there, in unfocused phone calls and cryptic letters, but for a time they could be ignored. Finally, on a reporting trip to Memphis, his hometown, Conaway visited his parents and faced the facts: his father was sick; he was in the early stages of what proved to be Alzheimer's disease. The dreaded illness is the inspiration for this beautifully written memoir of family and the South. As memory left his father, the author felt moved to recreate the world they had shared, to shore up as many fragments of the past as possible against oblivion. As it happens, many of those fragments are outrageously funny. Memphis Afternoons takes us back to a 1950s society when the rules of southern gentlemanliness were still in effect, if only barely. This is a world where propriety had always fought a dubious battle with bourbon, and now was being defeated by the likes of Elvis Presley. With a rueful wit, Conaway artfully renders a youth of hunting and fishing trips, brawls, and debutante parties, of sexual and alcoholic and literary explorations. The story is told against a wistful background of another generation, his father's, told with a belated appreciation for that generation's ideals, hopes, and its diminished postwar reality. Conaway writes of the idiosyncrasies of his family life with a keen yet tender sense of the absurd, particularly of a sometimes loving, mysterious relationship with his father. Linking the generations is an antiquated but powerful code of conduct, recalled here with extraordinary vividness and humor.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
The realization that his father was suffering from Alzheimer's disease provided the momentum for Conaway's ( Napa ) memoir about growing up in Memphis during the 1950s. Conaway delivers sharply etched portraits of members of his large extended family, including his grandfather, J. P. Alley, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons criticizing the Ku Klux Klan, and his Uncle Yank, who spun endless stories of barroom brawls. Conaway's parents were products and propagators of the Memphis class system, where knowing the right people and being able to differentiate between ``good'' and ``bad'' women were vital attributes. He describes a society permeated by casual racism and intense snobbery, where concerns about pledging the best fraternity eclipsed news of an emerging Civil Rights movement. His world widened by literature, Conaway left Memphis in the 1960s and here looks back at his southern boyhood with humor, and affection. Author tour. (May)Margaret Flanagan
The best-selling author of "The Big Easy" and "Napa" has penned an affectionate memoir of his youth in Memphis, Tennessee. Undertaken as a tribute to his ailing father, a victim of Alzheimer's disease, Conaway's reminiscences of his formative years are tinged with warmth, humor, and a bittersweet sense of loss. In spite of its intimate tone, this anecdotal chronicle moves beyond the realm of family history, providing an honest and highly evocative portrait of middle-class life in the South during the 1940s and 1950s. A poignant autobiographical odyssey as well as a mesmerizing slice of bygone Americana.Book Details
Published
October 14, 1993
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin (Trade)
Pages
256
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780395629451