Southern with a Capital S.

While I’ve made no secret of my affinity for the English, I’ve been pleasantly surprised how many of my U.K. acquaintances actually like all things Southern. When the wife of my friend David, who lives in Northern England in Durham County, read my book, she had to go out immediately and rent “Sweet Home Alabama” with Reese Witherspoon. I have mentioned on a couple of occasions that I found someone to edit my book. She’s a friend of my dear friend Mark Darlington and, like him, she’s British. In my first discussion with her, I was adamant that the southern voice of the book not be lost in the editing process. Lucky for me she seemed up to the task, and though she’s only about halfway through the book, she’s given me the positive reinforcement I was hoping for. Much like the character in my book, I couldn’t wait to leave the South when I got my first big job in D.C. The woman who hired me, and later became a close friend and mentor, actually confessed to me that she didn’t want to hire me. Why? She thought I was stupid because of my accent. (I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was in Mensa.) When I moved back to Atlanta ten years later, I felt adrift. It took me a good three years to feel at home again. But after buying a house, having two kids and being married for 22 years, my roots are deep and strong once again. I make a pretty mean banana bread and peach cobbler, and although I’ve never mastered the art of the homemade buttermilk biscuit the way my grandmother Bea made them, I do know they should have apple butter in them or gravy on them. Growing up, there was no need for the word “soda” in my vocabulary as there was only Coca-Cola. I knew to “speak up” but not to “talk back”,  and I learned the hard way that a “switch” wasn’t just that up and down lever on the wall. And while I don’t think I have a Southern accent, I need only go up North, where a simple query as to the time is met with a puzzled look and the question, “Who is Tom?” I have read Flannery O’ Connor, yet I’ve never spent time with  Eudora Welty or my grandfather’s literary hero, William Faulkner. But that is my plan for summer vacation. I want to write about love, loss, friendship, sex, family, pain, doubt...all the  things that make us human, but I hope I can do that with grace and humor, through that magical prism of what it means to be southern. Someone left a comment on my authonomy page the other day, asking if I might be the Southern Jane Austen. Does it get any better than that?

I make a pretty mean banana bread and peach cobbler, and although I’ve never mastered the art of the homemade buttermilk biscuit the way my grandmother Bea made them, I do know they should have apple butter in them or gravy on them. Growing up, there was no need for the word “soda” in my vocabulary as there was only Coca-Cola. I knew to “speak up” but not to “talk back”,  and I learned the hard way that a “switch” wasn’t just that up and down lever on the wall.