Low Country
A Memoir
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
"From horse thieves to hurricanes, from shattered Southern myths to fractured family ties, from Nashville to Myrtle Beach to Miami, Low Country is a lyrical, devastating, fiercely original memoir" of one family's changing fortunes in the Low Country of South Carolina (Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost).
J. Nicole Jones is the only daughter of a prominent South Carolina family, a family that grew rich building the hotels and seafood restaurants that draw tourists to Myrtle Beach. But at home, she is surrounded by violence and capriciousness: a grandfather who beats his wife, a barman father who dreams of being a country music star. At one time, Jones's parents can barely afford groceries; at another, her volatile grandfather presents her with a fur coat.
After a girlhood of extreme wealth and deep debt, of ghosts and folklore, of cruel men and unwanted spectacle, Jones finds herself face to face with an explosive possibility concerning her long-abused grandmother that she can neither speak nor shake. And through the lens of her own family's catastrophes and triumphs, Jones pays homage to the landscapes and legends of her childhood home, a region haunted by its history: Eliza Pinckney cultivates indigo, Blackbeard ransacks the coast, and the Gray Man paces the beach, warning of Hurricane Hazel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jones debuts with an intoxicating if puzzling story of her dysfunctional South Carolina family, who ran a mini-empire of hotels and seafood restaurants in Myrtle Beach, S.C. "The South does not own tragedy, but it sure seems to have taken a liking to the region," she writes. To illustrate, Jones strings together half-true tales of her unconventional upbringing, bankrolled "by tourists who anointed themselves with suntan oil." She recalls how her father "left us to move to Nashville more than a few times," in search of country-music stardom, but his and her mother's dreams were quashed by her "Granddaddy," a violent, tight-fisted patriarch whose employees were "as afraid of him as we were." A notorious bootlegger, he opened a number of motels, pancake houses, and bars, where her dad and uncles worked as bartenders and waiters, and tended to arcade games. Her nana endured a lifetime of abuse at the hands of Granddaddy, until a fall left him with his "scalp cut wide open." From here, Jones gambles on a speculative climax to her family's story that fails to deliver. While her sentences are finely wrought, they can't mask a weak narrative spine. This tale of a tourist-trap childhood would make a great beach read, if it weren't for the unfocused delivery.
