Dimestore

I was listening to NPR last week and heard the last few minutes of an interview with a writer who spoke with a deep-Southern accent.  She was talking about her daddy's dimestore and growing up in Appalachia. I kept listening, drawn in by the familiar cadences of her speech.

But it's not just the accent that's Southern; it's the whole voice--the rhythms, the allusions, the syntax of sentences, the structure of storytelling, the words of hymns all Southerners know by heart.  Wherever we spent our childhoods shapes what writers call "the voice."

Lee Smith has written many novels, but I haven't read any of them. After reading this memoir, Dimestore, A Writer's Life, I will. Her memoir has taken me on a journey this Sunday night--her first and second marriages, her childhood with parents who loved her like crazy but were both a little crazy, her writing life,  the death of her son, Josh....

The last chapter advises every writer to read The Little Locksmith by Katherine Butler Hathaway--which I just ordered. (It's an old book, one she gives to all her writing friends.) 

"I give it mostly to my sister writers (because it is one of the best books ever written about writing) but also to anyone suffering adversity of any sort, especially any kind of illness or disability, for it is truly a story of transformation, one of the finest spiritual autobiographies ever written." 

I bought Dimestore for Carlene and was only planning to skim a few pages, very carefully, without underlining or turning down pages, to see if she'd like it, but I couldn't put it down--so her copy is going to be pre-read when she gets here Tuesday and finds it on her bed.  My favorite chapter was "Angels Passing"--in which she writes about the echoes of voices of people she has loved and lost.  I had to stop reading because my eyes were all watery and the words were blurry. 

Another favorite chapter is "A Life In Books" in which she writes about the books she's read and the ones she's written--and the way that writing has saved her life over and over again.  It's not the books that saved her; it's the writing of the books.  

In her awful grief after her son's death, she went into a deep depression.

"Finally, I started going to a psychiatrist, a kind, rumpled man who formed his hands into a little tent and listened to me scream and cry and rave for several weeks."

Then he gave her a new prescription: "Write fiction every day."  

For three days, she sits in her chair and nothing comes.  On the fourth day, she begins a novel.

"Of course writing is an escape, but it's a source of nourishment and strength, too.  My psychiatrist's prescription may benefit us all. Whether we are writing fiction or nonfiction. journaling or writing for publication, writing itself is an inherently therapeutic activity. Simply to line up words one after another on a page is to create some order where it did not exist, to give a recognizable shape to the chaos of our lives.  Writing cannot bring our loved ones back, but it can sometimes fix them in our fleeting memories as they were in life...."