Synopses & Reviews
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady is Florence King's classic memoir of her upbringing in an eccentric Southern family, told with all the uproarious wit and gusto that has made her one of the most admired writers in the country. Florence may have been a disappointment to her Granny, whose dream of rearing a Perfect Southern Lady would never be quite fulfilled. But after all, as Florence reminds us, "no matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street."
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"Witty, intelligent, freewheeling....Surely the author told these stories before she wrote them, stretching and perfecting them with each telling, mining them for humor." Newsday
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"She leaves more old South traditions in shreds than Gen. William T. Sherman....Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady shoudl appeal to all belles, Southern or not, failed or not." Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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"Miss King, who lives in Virginia, is among the few writers who can make you laugh and gasp out loud....She is a social commentator who wipes away the thick-as-molasses layers of Southern sham...Write on, Miss King."
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"An outrageous commentator on men, women, and other sources of amusement, particularly the Southern variety....Florence King never loses her warmth, her humor, or her ability to be delighted by life's inherent contraditions." The Chicago Sun-Times
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"Florence's search for sheer lewdness through all the simpering traditions attempts to out-Portnoy Portnoy. It has the same outrageousness, the same heartlessness. When her lesbian lover dies in the end, she might just as well have slipped on a banana skin....It is unclear why she did not simply present it all as a slapstick roman a clef. Still, the book glitters with panache,this dance on the sagging borderline of salaciousness, and King has found a rich minefield of jokes about Belle-ism. But despite its mocking intelligence, its sheer entertainment value, it does not stay on in the mind. In twenty-four hours it's all gone with the wind." Jill Neville, The Times Literary Supplement
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"The damndest adventures in autobiographical hilarity to come down the pike in recent years....She is a Bombeck with bite, a female Art Buchwald with Southern sass, an A-one original American humorist down to her wicked, wicked bones." Susan Brownmiller
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"[This book] has none of the uncomfortable introspection or self-aggrandisement of too much modern autobiographical writing, yet it is never superficial....Stylistically the book employs a winning combination of the best in soap opera melodrama and the hot-timing, ding-dong dialogue usually found in Abbott and Costello movies. All this plus a sense of syntax strong enough to make Dr Johnson look like a beginner. It's a pleasure to be manipulated by a woman who writes so well, especially when comic writing is usually the preserve of men. I've never read so many perfect one-liners ('Like charity, schizophrenia begins at home') and it's a long time since I've laughed out loud through nearly 300 pages....This book is dynamite, don't miss it." Jeanette Winterson, New Statesman
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"The domestic comedy that makes up the first half of the memoir is, by turns, hilarious and overwrought, an unevenness that can be traced to the author's punchline-for-every-paragraph style....Both the prose and the comedy relax when Miss King enters college and begins to sample the larger world....Finishing Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, I realized that this often funny, always energetic book had brought me much pleasure and two sources of regret. The first is that the author, like so many women who came of age in the 50's, had no even minimally acceptable model for heterosexual love. The second is that a writer of Florence King's intelligence feels obliged to vamp us with vaudeville. My first regret has no remedy; a feminist consciousness had to wait its time. But Florence King has guts. I'll bet she'll find the courage one day soon to let us enjoy the seriousness inside the sometimes compulsive clown." Barbara Creaturo, The New York Times Book Review
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"A stunning book, a masterpiece." Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Florence King is the author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, With Charity Toward None, and other books. Though she still lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Washington-fed yuppies may yet drive her father into the hills.