Pig Candy

The “wonderful” (Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Times bestselling author), poignant, and often comical story of a grown daughter getting to know her dying father in his last months in the rural town he’d fled as a young Black man.

Lise Funderburg is a child of the 1960s, a white-looking mixed-race girl raised in an integrated Philadelphia neighborhood. As a child, she couldn’t imagine what had made her father so strict, demanding, and elusive. Of his past, she knew only that he had grown up in the Jim Crow South and fled its brutal oppression as a young man. Then, just as she hits her forties, her father is diagnosed with advanced and terminal cancer, an event that leads father and daughter together on a stream of pilgrimages to his hometown in rural Jasper County, Georgia. As her father’s escort, proxy, and, finally, nurse, Funderburg encounters for the first time the fragrant landscape and fraught society—and the extraordinary food—of his childhood.

In evocative prose, the author brings to life a fading rural South of pecan groves, family-run farms, and pork-laden country cuisine. She chronicles small-town relationships that span generations, the dismantling of her own assumptions about when race does and doesn’t matter, and the quiet segregation that persists to this day. As Funderburg discovers the place and people her father comes from, she also, finally, gets to know her magnetic, idiosyncratic father himself. Her account of their thorny but increasingly close relationship is full of warmth, humor, and disarming candor.

“Pig Candy is a candid and moving memoir of a daughter's deep love for her father both when he is most difficult to love and impossible not to. Unforgettable and powerful, we are changed for the better by every page of it” (Edwidge Danticat, author of The Dew Breaker).