Redheaded Reviews: Dimestore: A Writer's Life by Lee Smith

Lee Smith, an Oprah author, has written Dimestore which is not your typical memoir in that it focuses mainly on the author's writing life and how that has been affected and shaped by life events. Lee Smith's father, a manic depressive, owned a dimestore in the mountains of Grundy, Virginia. She did her part with the store such as to help pick out the dolls when she was a child and to arrange them on the shelf and keep them clean. She would move them so that their arms were outstretched as though waiting for a child to come along and pick them up.

She was an only child to elderly parents who thought to never have children. They were both mentally ill. Her mother as her father said was "kindly nervous" and would have to spend time in a mental hospital as would her daddy when the depression would hit at the end of a manic episode. But there was always someone in the family to step up and run the store and help out at home and very rarely were both of them in the hospital at the same time.

Mental illness is believed to be genetic and her mother's side is rampant with examples of it. It's a wonder Lee wasn't mentally ill herself. However, one of her two sons would be diagnosed as a schizo-affective disorder which is a combination of schizophrenia and manic depression. She and both her first husband and her second husband were lucky in that he, Josh, wanted to take his medicines and gave them no trouble in that way as some mentally ill people can do and with good reason. The side effects can be atrocious and once you start to feel well you begin to believe you do not need them anymore. In Josh's case, the side effect of his medication was causing weight gain and high blood pressure which was doing his heart no favors. At age thirty-three, he died in his sleep of heart failure. This affected Lee's writing in that she at first couldn't write a single thing. Then slowly she began to write her way through her grief.

In college, Lee wrote many stories about stewardesses in Hawaii and things such as that but got Bs and Cs. She asked her professor why and he told her to write what she knew. So she wrote a story about a group of older women she remembered from home sitting on the porch talking about the change of life and getting a hysterectomy. She got an A. A writer must find their voice and hers was in the Appalachian Mountains for the most part. It was what she knew and who she was and where she got her stories from.

This book is an easy read like gliding down the river (not the mighty Mississippi River that she and her girlfriends take a raft and go down on when she is in college) on a nice Spring day. Yes, there is some sadness in it like when it talks about her son or the changes that have come to her hometown, but overall it is as sweet as the honeysuckle she drinks from and just as good.

Quotes

Now they are going to really talk, about somebody who “has just never been quite right, bless her heart,” or somebody who is “kindly nervous”, or somebody else who’s “been having trouble down there.” Down there is a secret place, a foreign country, like Mexico or Nicaragua.

-Lee Smith (Dimestore: A Writer’s Life p 14)

No matter what is wrong with you, a sausage biscuit will make you feel a whole lot better.

-Lee Smith (Dimestore: A Writer’s Life p 39)

My father was fond of saying that I would climb a tree to tell to tell a lie rather than stand on the ground to tell the truth.

-Lee Smith (Dimestore: A Writer’s Life p 63-4)

The South runs on denial. We learn denial in the cradle and carry it to the grave. It is absolutely essential to being a lady, for instance. My Aunt Gay-Gay’s two specialties were Rising to the Occasion and Rising Above It All, whatever “it” happened to be. Aunt Gay-Gay believed that if you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all. If you don’t discuss something, it doesn’t exist. She drank a lot of gin and tonics and sometimes she’d start in on them early, winking at my Uncle Bob and saying, “Pour me one, honey, it’s dark underneath the house.”

-Lee Smith (Dimestore: A Writer’s Life p 110-11)

A layer of conservatism still covers Dixie like dew. As a whole, we Southerners are still religious, and we are still violent. We’ll bring you a casserole, but we’ll kill you, too. Southern women, both black and white, have always been more likely than Northern women to work outside the home, despite the image projected by such country lyrics as “Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed, this women’s literature is a-going to your head.” It was not because we were so liberated; it’s because we were so poor.

-Lee Smith (Dimestore: A Writer’s Life p 117)

I asked him whether or not he believed in Jesus. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Every time I’m in the hospital, there are at least three people in there who think they’re Jesus. So sometimes I think, well, maybe Jesus wasn’t Jesus at all—maybe he was just the first schizophrenic.”

-Lee Smith (Dimestore: A Writer’s Life p 129-30)

Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, “I write because I want more than one life.”

-Lee Smith (Dimestore: A Writer’s Life p 167)