Clear Springs

People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because the stories she tells of family life ring true. In this dazzling memoir, Mason tells her own story -- a multilayered saga of three generations that recaptures a way of life that has all but disappeared: a country culture deeply rooted in work and food and family, in common sense and music and the land. In Clear Springs, Mason writes about the lives of her parents and grandparents and gracefully weaves together several different lives, decades, and locales, moving from the sober industry of a Kentucky farm to the hippie lifestyle of the '60s New York counterculture to the shock-therapy ward of a mental institution; from a farmhouse to the set of a Hollywood movie; from a small rustic schoolhouse to pop music concerts. Mason depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the twentieth century, and tells her own odyssey -- how a misfit girl who only dreamed of distant places grew up and fulfilled her ambition to be a writer.