Through the Groves
A Memoir
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4.6 • 21 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Hypnotic and tender, this book reminds us that even if we leave our homes, our homes never leave us.”
—Oprah Daily
“[Hull] has that sly eye for sublime details, but also a killer instinct for tight storytelling.”
—Carl Hiaasen, New York Times Book Review
A richly evocative coming-of-age memoir set in the Florida orange groves of the 1960s by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father’s family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. “Look now,” her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. “It will all be gone.” But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations. All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in. She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape.
Here, Hull captures it all—the smells and sounds of a disappearing way of life, the secret rituals and rhythms of a doomed family, the casual racism of the rural South in the 1960s, and the suffocating expectations placed on girls and women.
Vividly atmospheric and haunting, Through the Groves will speak to anyone who’s ever left home to cut a path of their own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer-winning journalist Hull recounts her Florida upbringing in this entrancing coming-out and coming-of-age memoir. She begins in 1967, as her parents' marriage crumbled along with her father's mental health. Soon, Hull's mother moved Hull and her siblings from the sleepy town of Sebring to St. Petersburg, where Hull vividly conjures the "apocalyptic signage" lining State Road 60, a talking mermaid display at "the World's Most Unusual Drug Store," the exotic clutter of her Grandma Damie's house, and the severe nuns at her Catholic school. She paints a masterful, full-fleshed portrait of the Florida of her youth, facing down its racism by detailing the segregated "Black Sebring" neighborhood across the tracks from her childhood home that "felt like a separate town," and unpacking her distaste for the gender expectations foisted upon her by her conservative grandma Gigi and her namesake, Aunt Anne, while Hull was still in the closet. As she recounts coming to understand her sexuality and planning her escape from Florida in the process, Hull dispatches invaluable insights into Deep South culture and Cold War–era gender politics, but they sometimes come at the expense of her personal story. Still, this is a stirring account of growing up at odds with one's environment and making it out on the other side.
Customer Reviews
Slow summer song
The words are like a slow song on a hot summer’s day. They carry you along at exactly the right metronome beat to soak in the smell of orange blossoms, the desolation of an abandoned downtown, the challenges of family all through the eyes of a girl coming of age.
Gripping story, well told
Truthful and full of emotion