Southern Sin
True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
23 strange-but-true stories of women flirting with perdition... In the steamy South, temptation is as wild and plentiful as kudzu. Whether the sin in question is skinny-dipping or becoming an unlikely porn star, running rum or renting out a room to a pair of exhibitionistic adulterers, in these true stories women defy tradition and forge their own paths through life—often learning unexpected lessons from the experience.
As Dorothy Allison writes in her introduction, “The most dangerous stories are the true ones, the ones we hesitate to tell, the adventures laden with fear or shame or the relentless pull of regret. Some of those are about things that we are secretly deeply proud to have done.”
A diverse array of contributors—mothers, daughters, sisters, best friends, fiancées, divorcees, professors, poets, lifeguards-in-training, lapsed Baptists, tipsy debutantes, middle-aged lesbians—lend their voices to this collection. Introspective and abashed, joyous and triumphant (but almost never apologetic), they remind us that sin, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dorothy Allison's introduction to this nonfiction anthology about sinful interludes by Southern women may be the best thing about it. In four short pages she explains the pride behind the shame, the Southern story-telling tradition, and provides a lyrical description of sin. Six hundred essays were submitted to Creative Nonfiction magazine, 23 of which were selected for this collection. Most recount personal experiences in memoir-like prose, letting the writer's imagination, by way of first person narration, do most of the sinning. The anthology kicks off with "What Was Left," by Molly Langmuir; if only the mesmerizing quality of her ode to friendship were the norm rather than the exception. While many selections lack the excitement of Langmuir's, several worthy essays deserve mention. In Sheila Raeschild's "Circles of Light," the writer uses her mother's Yiddish slams on bad behavior as the mental backdrop for a long weekend of outrageous sex with a stranger in Miami. New Orleans is the star in "The On-Ramp," Amy Thigpen's exploration of the city's seductiveness. Gail Griffin channels the Brothers Grimm in "Out of the Woods;" the sexism and racism of the time and place turn the local woods into the dark and scary place that was the Medieval forest. Rachael Peckham is a fly on the wall in a golden couple's marriage in the ominous "A Lesson in Merging."