Synopses & Reviews
23 strange-but-true stories of women flirting with perdition... In the steamy South, temptation is as wild and plentiful as kudzu. Whether the sin in question is skinny-dipping or becoming an unlikely porn star, running rum or renting out a room to a pair of exhibitionistic adulterers, in these true stories women defy tradition and forge their own paths through lifeoften learning unexpected lessons from the experience.
As Dorothy Allison writes in her introduction, The most dangerous stories are the true ones, the ones we hesitate to tell, the adventures laden with fear or shame or the relentless pull of regret. Some of those are about things that we are secretly deeply proud to have done.”
A diverse array of contributorsmothers, daughters, sisters, best friends, fiancées, divorcees, professors, poets, lifeguards-in-training, lapsed Baptists, tipsy debutantes, middle-aged lesbianslend their voices to this collection. Introspective and abashed, joyous and triumphant (but almost never apologetic), they remind us that sin, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Review
People say that God listens most to the prayers of a hard sinner and Southerners do everything hard: love, fight, pray, drink, and live. Theres nobody Id rather have on my side than a sultry, sinning, Southern woman. Read this book and youll understand why.” —Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight
This delicious collection slyly moves between dramatic transgressions—slicing your lovers throat or refusing to aid a woman who may just have been assaulted—and small transgressions—slapping your Mama on the face, shoplifting cheap bras at the mall, poking through your mentors trash to discover the twirls of dental floss before fondling her shower gel, insisting that a vibrator adverse lesbian try one—never missing a beat, as author after author confesses, brags, tells, a story of a woman dancing with the devil—all alone or in raggedy company. Over and over again the heroines of these true histories discover being wildly lost often leads to being self-found. Southern Sin is a significant addition to liberation literature that transcends regionalism even as it celebrates it. At the center of this project is a breaking and re-making of the American Puritan concept of the power of confession.”
—Alice Randall, author of The Wind Done Gone
Synopsis
No shy, retiring belles here! Whether remembering of the power of a cheerleader uniform or flirting with other womens husbands; dancing warm nights away with strangers or renting out rooms to adulterers with an exhibitionistic streak; reflecting on the road not taken or hitch-hiking on the broad road to perdition, in this collection of true stories, women play with firesometimes literally.
Synopsis
These stories may be from the South, but there are no shy, retiring belles here! Whether remembering of the power of a cheerleading uniform or flirting with another womans husband, the women in this collection of true stories play with fire sometimes literally. These stories range from the poetic and personal dancing warm nights away with strangers and renting out rooms to adulterers with an exhibitionistic streak to the journalistic, including a piece about Willie Carter Sharpe, the queen of Roanoke rum runners,” as well as a story about Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward, whose plan to run away and live as man” and wife ended in scandal and murder in 1892. This collection includes contributions by Southern women from a broad range of circumstances and stages of life: teenage cheerleaders, middle-aged lesbians struggling to find acceptance from their aging parents, and Atlanta divorcees trying to get back into the dating game.
About the Author
Lee Gutkind has been exploring the world of medicine through writing for over 20 years. He is the author of
Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation, and the editor of four anthologies about health and medicine:
Silence Kills: Speaking Out and Saving Lives;
Rage and Reconciliation: Inspiring a Health Care Revolution;
Healing; and
Becoming a Doctor. He is the founder and editor of the magazine
Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary journal to exclusively publish nonfiction, and has also published the essay collection
Forever Fat and two books on writing,
The Art of Creative Nonfiction and
Keep It Real, among other titles. Gutkind currently teaches creative writing at Arizona State Universitys Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes.
Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. Now living in Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son, Wolf Michael, she describes herself as a feminist, a working-class storyteller, a Southern expatriate, a sometime poet and a happily born-again Californian. A novelist, short-story writer, and poet, Allison received mainstream recognition with her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley prize, an ALA Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing, became a bestseller, and an award-winning movie. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Allison is a member of the board of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A novel, She Who, is forthcoming.