Marvelous Midwest Memoirs

This woman named Haven Kimmel wrote a memoir, A Girl Named Zippy, and then followed it with She Got Up Off the Couch. They focus on her life in Mooreland, Indiana, which is amazingly close to where I grew up. I love this woman's writing. She has the drollest (most droll?) sense of humor. One example:

Just a glance at persimmons reveals them to be suspicious fruits and yet we ate them constantly. Joyce put them in jams and pies, she even made something with the word "pudding" in the title although of course it was not real pudding because it wasn't chocolate and it didn't come from a box. I was too polite to point the truth out.

I picked up one of her novels (The Solace of Leaving Early) from the library; as of page 9, I still like it, which is a relief. Mostly I am relieved because some people write funny, engaging nonfiction and then disappoint me with their fiction. I find this to be especially tragic when the author involved wrote a "how to write" book that I love. Well, this holds true for Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird, the writing book, and Hard Laughter, her first novel). I've never bothered to track down any novels by writing guru Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones, etc.).

category: reading