13 May 2020: Re-reading this book for the first time since grad school in preparation for a talk I am supposed to give on campus in September (hard to imagine it happening in person, but who knows?). It's kind of amazing how much of it I remember over twenty years later. I could pick any number of passages to illustrate Allison's powerful prose, but here's just one, a description of her mother:
"There was only one way to fight off the pity and hatefulness. Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt. She got a reputation for an easy smile and a sharp tongue, and using one to balance the other, she seemed friendly but distant. No one knew that she cried in the night for Lyle and her lost happiness, that under that biscuit-crust exterior she was all butter grief and hunger, that more than anything else in the world she wanted someone strong to love her like she loved her girls."
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