Southern Discomfort
A Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
‘Where I grew up, girls like me knew our place ... we understood that stepping off the prescribed path in any way meant risking it all, and probably losing.’
On the outside, Tena Clark’s childhood in rural Mississippi in the 1960s looked like a fairytale. Her father was one of the richest men in the state; her mother was a beauty. The family lived on a sprawling farm and had the only swimming pool in town. Tena was given her first car – a navy blue Camaro – at twelve.
Behind closed doors, her parents’ marriage was a swamp of alcohol, rampant infidelity and guns. Adding to the turmoil, Tena understood from a very young age that she was different from her three older sisters, all beauty queens and majorettes. She didn’t want to be a majorette – she wanted to marry one.
On Tena’s tenth birthday, her mother walked out on her father for good and Tena was left in the care of her black nanny, Virgie, who became Tena’s surrogate mother and confidante – even though she was raising nine of her own children.
It was Virgie’s acceptance and unconditional love that gave Tena the courage to stand up to her domineering father, the faith to believe in her mother’s love, and the strength to challenge the bigotry that defined her world and be her true self.
PRAISE FOR SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT
‘Tena Clark is a pioneering force of nature, and her story is as powerful, riveting and inspiring as she is.’ Maria Shriver
‘A brave, wildly engrossing memoir.’ Bill Clegg, author of Did You Ever Have a Family
‘It’s easy to see how this book has been compared to The Help. But Clark’s debut is an entirely original – and true – story.’ Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clark paints a raw and deeply honest picture of her childhood in 1950s and '60s Mississippi. Clark, who is white, writes movingly of her black maid and stand-in mother, Virgie, who was not allowed to eat in her kitchen or white restaurants; of her mother's forced stay at a barbaric mental hospital, at the insistence of her father; of her father's casual and continued cruelty toward her sister, Toni (he hit her when she was a child and insulted her weight gain as an adult); and, ultimately, of the forces that helped Clark to leave her hometown for the Univ. of Southern Mississippi to pursue a career in music and the short-lived relationship that resulted in her daughter, Cody. What Clark shows so beautifully is that the people she discusses, as unredeemable as they may at first seem, are much more complex: her father, never one to shy away from using racial epithets, secretly helped build the local black church; her alcoholic mother, trying to deal with her husband's many affairs, eventually stood up to him; and Clark herself realized at the age of six that she was gay, but she still dressed up like a conventional Southern belle. Clark's narrative draws the reader in to a wonderful story of the South going from old to new.)
