Dimestore: A Writer's Life

The Autobiography of Lee Smith, author of [b:Fair and Tender Ladies|199635|Fair and Tender Ladies|Lee Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389575982s/199635.jpg|1437835], [b:On Agate Hill|199636|On Agate Hill|Lee Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442970592s/199636.jpg|1851466], and [b:The Last Girls|126873|The Last Girls|Lee Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1333577608s/126873.jpg|2636756], is so beautifully written and heartfelt that you feel she is a neighbor or a friend, or at the least a person you would feel comfortable sharing a coke and hotdog with.

Born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia, Lee infuses her writing with a sense of place and persons who have all but vanished from the face of the earth. This is Appalachia show more at its core, coal-mining country, where family live across the street and over the holler and the other side of the mountain, and you cannot go anywhere without being recognized and cared for.

I particularly enjoyed this part of these essays, but it was also interesting to see how she took this beginning and lived a full life in other places and environments without losing this sense of who she was. Having always been interested in how others write, and why, it was enlightening to hear her stories of how she progressed from scribbling bits of imaginings to tapping into the depths of her soul for characters that resonated, like [b:Fair and Tender Ladies|199635|Fair and Tender Ladies|Lee Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389575982s/199635.jpg|1437835]’ Ivy Rowe.

She shares some of her heartbreaks, some of her loves, other authors she has admired, people who have influenced her, and the intimacies of the family she came from and the ones that she built with her two husbands. She seems to have scaled some heights without developing any feeling of superiority to others. She would confess to being privileged and yet admits to a life that has been less than perfection. There is much to be admired in both the writing the woman. show less

I received an Advance Readers Copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I was so enchanted by the first essay that the rest of the book was a bit of a letdown. I would have loved a linear memoir about growing up in Buchanan County in Southwest Virginia, ending with Smith's raft trip down the Mississippi as a young woman. I got the feeling that some of this material has been lying around for a while and was cobbled together to make this book. Her memories of teaching writing, for example, do not have quite the warmth and joy of her childhood memories. And what some of us would give if novels were just narrated by our brains and we were merely stenographers. Can it possibly be that simple, even for her? I show more wanted so badly to stay longer in her childhood, running wild on the mountains, arranging dolls in the dimestore so that their arms were outstretched toward customers, listening to the womenfolks' gossip.

Why is there not a humorous essay on the utter futility of sending a mountain tomboy to an Alabama finishing school? I would have eaten it up with a spoon. So many delightful stories are hinted at, but not told.

In the last essay, we end up in Maine, where Smith honors a book and writer almost no one has ever heard of. This was a disappointment for me, who also grew up in Southwest Virginia; what does remote Yankee territory have to do with anything?

Nevertheless, Smith's writing absolutely glows. She makes the reader feel so many emotions so powerfully. Her account of her trip to the three-story Grundy Walmart, for example, is wonderful (you can't go home again), as are her memories of her son who developed a mental illness and died very young. We also must give Smith full props for being a mentor to other Appalachian writers, such as Silas House and Lou Crabtree. Smith has brought not only her jaw-dropping talent to the literature of the region for more than 45 years, but also has encouraged the development of an entire genre.

Lee Smith's mother was determined to raise a "lady" with "culture," and Smith has become one of the foremost ladies of Appalachian culture--not quite what her mother had in mind, but an inspiration to all of us who come from these rolling hills full of story and song. show less

Remember that line from the film, Jerry Maguire, "You had me from hello"? Well I thought of that when I began reading Lee Smith's DIMESTORE: A WRITER'S LIFE recently. Because she had me from the cover photo, an old b&w photo - 60s vintage, I suspect - of her as a beautiful young mother sitting in the grass with a chubby baby. In fact when she describes her own mother in the essay, "Lady Lessons" - "... and she was, I have to say, an absolutely adorable young woman." - she could have been describing herself. Like mother, like daughter no doubt.

Smith's memoir is equal parts bitter and sweet, funny and sad. Because there are memories of loving, if at times dysfunctional parents, a failed first marriage, and the loss of a very talented son show more who suffered from mental illness for all of his adult life ("Goodbye to the Sunset Man"). In "Big River" her raft trip down the Mississippi with fifteen other Hollins classmates, made famous in her bestseller, THE LAST GIRLS, is given a closer look, in a delightfully light-hearted manner.

"If anything really bad happened to us, we figured we could call up our parents collect and they would come and fix things. We expected to be taken care of ... We all smoked cigarettes. We were all cute."

And "Driving Miss Daisy Crazy" gives us the mythical maiden-lady English teacher, Miss Daisy, who "believes it is true about the two ladies who got kicked out of the Nashville Junior League: on for having an orgasm, and the other for having a job."

If I had to pick a favorite piece here, it would probably be "Blue Heaven," in which Smith takes us up through the years as she falls in love multiple times, from college days in 1965, through her "last love" with her current husband and up to 2012. I should probably note here that Lee Smith and I are the same age, which is probably why I could relate to so many things in this book. Or maybe I should choose "A Life in Books," where she talks of how writing helped assuage the grief she felt when her mother and her son died. She says -

"Writing cannot bring our loved ones back, but it can sometimes fix them in our fleeting memories as they were in life, and it can always help us make it through the night."

There is plenty in DIMESTORE (a title taken from her father's store in tiny Grundy, Virginia) about writing and writers too, but mostly I loved all she shared about her personal life. Her dad's store made me remember the dimestores of my own childhood, one of which, like her father's, evolved into a Ben Franklin store before it finally closed its doors just a half dozen years ago, the end of an era. Sadly, free-range childhoods like ours are long gone too, of course, which is why books like DIMESTORE are so very important. Thank you, Lee. My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, REED CITY BOY show less

Writers can spring from anywhere, even a seemingly nothing town like Grundy, Va. Although she grew up reading books and telling stories in Grundy, it took Lee Smith several years for this realization to hit her. Until then she had wondered what the daughter of a Ben Franklin store manager living deep in coal-mining country might possibly have to write about. Now in her 70s, the author of more than a dozen novels lives in North Carolina but keeps returning to those western Virginia mountains in her mind. That place and those people, she discovered, are virtually all she has to write about, and they are more than enough.

Smith tells her story in disjointed fashion in "Dimestore: A Writer's Life," mostly a collection of magazine and show more newspaper articles published over the past 20 years. She describes growing up in Grundy and how, at the time at least, it seemed like paradise. She tells of being her father's "doll consultant" every year at Christmas. As a child she wanted to become a saint, or at least an angel in the Christmas pageant. Neither happened. Both of her parents suffered from bouts of severe depression, and she admits her own fears of this condition. She tells of romances, marriages, children and the tragic loss of one of those children. Mostly, however, she writes about writing and, as she puts it, "the therapeutic power of language." After the death of her son, in fact, a psychiatrist wrote a prescription for her. It said only, "Write fiction every day." It was just the therapy she needed

In one of her better essays, one called "On Lou's Front Porch," she gives one of the better definitions of writing you will find. Writing, she says, "is not about fame, or even publication. It is not about exalted language, abstract themes, or the escapades of glamorous people. It is about our own real world and our own real lives and understanding what happens to us day by day, it is about playing with children and listening to old people." show less

A delightful collection of memoir-like essays. Smith makes us feel comfortable, as if she's telling us stories on the porch. She combines amusing looks at people's foibles with insightful views that honor the mountain folks' integrity. She exposes the love and pain that accompany her family, and she introduces us to writers she has admired such as James Still and Katharine Butler Hathaway. Dimestore lends insight into Smith's own writing and the writing of many writers who share her heritage.

Lee Smith is a wonderful storyteller, and for the last forty-five years she has been telling us stories about life in the Appalachian Mountains, a region and a people she knows like the back of her hand. Now, in Dimestore: A Writer’s Life, Smith finally shares her own story. I see that the book’s subtitle changed somewhere between its publication as an Advance Readers Copy and its final version, but I actually find the ARC subtitle to be the more fitting of the two (“A Memoir in Stories”) because that perfectly describes the approach Smith takes here in recounting her life for readers.

Dimestore begins with a straightforward preface in which the author remarks on the irony of being “raised to leave” the culture closest to her show more heart, the setting in which she would always feel most comfortable and welcome. But, for her sake, that is exactly what Smith’s family sought to do, recognizing early on that Smith had a talent that needed to be tested outside the confines of tiny Grundy, Virginia. A further irony is how the rest of the world finally came to appreciate the rich cultural uniqueness of her region’s people, and especially of their music and literature. Lee Smith would know, and merge, the best of both worlds.

Following the preface, Smith divides the book into short-story-like sections that provide her readers with glimpses into her life from childhood to late adulthood. She begins appropriately with a section titled “Dimestore” that recalls the role her father’s downtown Grundy dimestore played in shaping her into both the person and the writer she is today. As a girl she spent whole days wandering around the store, so familiar in that setting that she was largely invisible to the adults around her even when not observing them through the upstairs office window. She says that she “spent hours and hours upstairs in that office, observing the whole floor of the dimestore through the one-way glass window and reveling in my own power – nobody can see me, but I can see everybody!” Smith, already a budding writer, believes that this is how she “learned the position of the omniscient narrator, who sees and records everything, yet is never visible…the perfect education for a fiction writer.”

Smith goes on to tell stories about the health problems, both real and imagined, her parents suffered; her education, including visits to her Baltimore grandmother for “lady lessons;” her college girl rafting adventure down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers from Paducah, Kentucky to New Orleans; and the people she still so clearly remembers from her years in Grundy. But fans of Smith’s fiction are likely to appreciate most the “story” titled “A Life in Books” in which she recalls her early fascination with books, stories, and writing. Here Smith reveals what being a writer has taught her about life and about herself. She says that like Peter Taylor, she “writes in order to find out what she thinks,” and that no matter what she thinks she is writing about “it is all, finally, about me, often in some complicated way I won’t come to understand until years later.”

Lee Smith admits that writing is her addiction, and I, for one, and very thankful that it is. show less

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir. I think some of my favorite essays were the ones that centered on writing, but they were all good, poignant, and wise.

In many ways Smith had one of those idyllic childhoods with two doting parents, but they both had their issues, which meant that Smith had to stay with other relatives from time to time. Her mother was "kindly nervous," and her father suffered mental illness.

Despite its brevity, Smith packs a ton of entertaining tidbits into this book about her life in Grundy, VA and beyond. She was hilarious in parts (like when she thought she'd run out of material to write) and equally riveting when she told of her son's mental illness.

If you love Smith's fiction, this gives you the key to her show more thoughts, what makes her tic, and the honesty of her heart. Highly recommend! show less