O the Clear Moment

If “memoirabilia” were a word, it would perfectly describe O the Clear Moment. In this enormously appealing “implied autobiography,” Ed McClanahan has assembled a gathering of stories that are both quirky and cutting, all told in the inimitable voice of one of his generation’s best Southern chroniclers of American life.

McClanahan launches his tale in 1950, the year he turned 17 and had his “Personal Best Great Moment” — one that involved Lucky Strikes, a Tony Curtis forelock, a pretty girl named Bernice, and several raw eggs. From there, McClanahan is off and running, describing characters from his eventful life with affectionate and precise detail.

Like “escapees from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post,” McClanahan and his stories come alive as American souvenirs, enchanting readers with his signature prose.

Publishers Weekly

Playful, self-deprecating and wickedly sharp, McClanahan's nine autobiographical short stories delve into youthful shenanigans and poignant first love in the late 1940s in Bracken County, Kentucky. McClanahan has an enormously personable style, ambling back in time to his junior year at Maysville High School in "Great Moments in Sports," when, mooning about the four Stonebreaker sisters like every other horny goat in town, he experienced his greatest moment of coolness and his greatest humiliation. In "Dog Loves Ellie," a high-school reunion of his Class of '51 prompts the author to revisit magnificent, painful memories of his first major crush, Ellie Chadwick, who invited the gangly youth to the Sadie Hawkins dance and then dumped him for a less worthy suitor named Dog. "Fondelle, or: The Whore with a Heart of God," the most sparkling of the collection, chronicles the author's early hitchhiking adventure the summer before his senior year in college. A former Merry Prankster, McClanahan muses on the writing life and classic Americana with giddy nostalgia and gently barbed humor.