About the Book
About the Book
Dimestore: A Writer's Life
In her first work of nonfiction, Lee Smith deploys the wit, wisdom and graceful prose for which she is beloved to conjure her early days in the small coal town of Grundy, Virginia --- and beyond.
For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For 45 years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story.
Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters and her daddy’s dimestore. It was in that dimestore --- listening to customers and inventing adventures for the store’s dolls --- that she became a storyteller. Even when she was sent off to college to earn some “culture,” she understood that perhaps the richest culture she might ever know was the one she was driving away from --- and it’s a place that she never left behind.
DIMESTORE's 15 essays are crushingly honest, wise and perceptive, and superbly entertaining. Smith has created both a moving personal portrait and a testament to embracing one’s heritage. It’s also an inspiring story of the birth of a writer and a poignant look at a way of life that has all but vanished.
Audiobook available, narrated by Linda Stephens
Dimestore: A Writer's Life
- Publication Date: April 4, 2017
- Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction
- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Algonquin Books
- ISBN-10: 1616206462
- ISBN-13: 9781616206468