Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir $26.00
New York, NY: Crown Publishing (2014)
A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the regions powerful influence on her life.
The author of three beloved books about her life in Italy, including “Under the Tuscan Sun” and “Every Day in Tuscany,” Frances Mayes revisits the turning points that defined her early years in Fitzgerald, Georgia. With her signature style and grace, Mayes explores the power of landscape, the idea of home, and the lasting force of a chaotic and loving family.
From her years as a spirited, secretive child, through her university studies–a period of exquisite freedom that imbued her with a profound appreciation of friendship and a love of travel–to her escape to a new life in California, Mayes exuberantly recreates the intense relationships of her past, recounting the bitter and sweet stories of her complicated family: her beautiful yet fragile mother, Frankye; her unpredictable father, Garbert; Daddy Jack, whose life Garbert saved; grandmother Mother Mayes; and the family maid, Francess confidant Willie Bell.
“Under Magnolia” is a searingly honest, humorous, and moving ode to family and place, and a thoughtful meditation on the ways they define us, or cause us to define ourselves. With acute sensory language, Mayes relishes the sweetness of the South, the smells and tastes at her family table, the fragrance of her hometown trees, and writes an unforgettable story of a girl whose perspicacity and dawning self-knowledge lead her out of the South and into the rest of the world, and then to a profound return home.
Swan $25.00
New York, NY: Broadway Books (2002)
In her celebrated memoirs of life in Tuscany, Frances Mayes writes masterfully about people in a powerful and shaping place. In Swan, her first novel, she has created an equally intimate world, rich with striking characters and intriguing twists of fate, that hearkens back to her Southern roots. The Masons are a prominent but now fragmented family who have lived for generations in Swan, an edenic, hidebound small Georgia town. As Swan opens, a bizarre crime pulls Ginger Mason home from her life as an archaeologist in Italy: The body of her mother, Catherine, a suicide nineteen years earlier, has been mysteriously exhumed. Reunited on new terms with her troubled, isolated brother J.J., who has never ventured far from Swan, the Mason children grapple with the profound effects of their mother’s life and death on their own lives. When a new explanation for Catherine’s death emerges, and other closely guarded family secrets rise to the surface as well, Ginger and J.J. are confronted with startling truths about their family, a particular ordeal in a family and a town that would prefer to keep the past buried. Beautifully evoking the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the Deep South while telling an utterly compelling story of the complexity of family ties, Swan marks the remarkable fiction debut of one of America’s best-loved writers.