My Appalachia: A Memoir Book

This begins as a typical memoir with much interesting data of life in the Appalachians in the first half of the 20th century. Much is from the child's point of view. While life is primitive, the large close family had many good times. Descriptions of farming, food and pastimes are engaging, if sometimes overly nostalgic. The author was married at 15 to an older abusive man; she pursued a correspondence education to get a high school diploma. Life was hard, the couple adopted the illegitimate son of a relative and much later, the author had a son through an affair which her husband suspected, but he raised the boy as his own. Their marriage never improved and eventually they divorced Saylor Farr is candid about her need for affection. She retains many superstitions of the mountain people even as she continued her education and began to write and publish in the Kentucky community of Berea. Next, she married a much younger bi-sexual man and they were happy for a number of years, before he left her for another man. She had been accepting of his conflicted sexuality, but ultimately he distanced himself. I give her a lot of credit for her honesty, though sometimes it's apparent to the reader that she continued to fall prey to unsophisticated ideas, i.e. that holiness snake handlers can be safe if their belief is strong, or the prophecies of Edgar Cayce or rather simplistic notions of spirits and ghosts. Saylor Farr works in the mountain community and in Berea College and advanced beyond the circumscribed world of her childhood which seems nothing like the meth-infested poverty stricken Appalachia of today. Her descriptions of the self-sufficiency of people of her parent's generation'how they managed to live off the stony hilly land, putting in gardens, the men hunting, raising hogs and chickens, utilizing every single element they had to sustain life are quite fascinating. She does point out that the mainstay of the mountain people was moonshine'their only valuable cash crop, and the reader suspects that many of the "haunts" and "strange noises' and "ghostly apparitions" that men report as they wend their way home from a night's hunting was likely fueled by imbibing the product of their stills