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Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir
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Published:
Crown 2014
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description

A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region’s 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, Frances’s 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.

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
04/01/2014
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780307885937
ASIN:
B00FO5YFGQ
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Frances Mayes. (2014). Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir. Crown.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Frances Mayes. 2014. Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir. Crown.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir. Crown, 2014.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Frances Mayes. Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir. Crown, 2014.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Jun 12, 2018 19:13:05
Date Updated:
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      • bioText: Frances Mayes is the author of the now-classic Under the Tuscan Sun, which was a New York Times bestseller for more than two and a half years and became a Touchstone movie starring Diane Lane. Other international bestsellers include: Bella Tuscany, Everyday in Tuscany, A Year in the World, and three illustrated books: In Tuscany, Bringing Tuscany Home, and The Tuscan Sun Cookbook. She is also the author of two novels, Swan and Women in Sunlight. She has written six books of poetry and The Discovery of Poetry. The most recent books are See You in the Piazza and Always Italy. Her books have been translated into more than fifty languages.
      • name: Frances Mayes
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publishDate
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title
Under Magnolia
fullDescription

A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region’s 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, Frances’s 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.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: New York Times Book Review
      • content: "The strength of Under Magnolia lies in the very claustrophobia Mayes aches to flee as a child...In certain heightened moments of this memoir, Mayes breathes the same air as [Carson] McCullers."
      • premium: False
      • source: Atlanta Journal Constitution
      • content: "As gothic as anything Faulkner could have dreamed up, populated by characters straight out of a Flannery O'Connor story...a thorny memoir that strips away the polite Southern masks, sweet magnolias be damned. Unforgettable."
      • premium: False
      • source: USAToday.com
      • content: "With perfect-pitch language, Mayes unblinkingly describes her growing-up years... One can almost taste the mushiness of 'a pot of once-green beans falling apart in salt pork'; one can almost smell the cloying scent of honeysuckle, gardenias and overripe peaches that infuse the always-too-humid air."
      • premium: False
      • source: Roanoke Times
      • content: "Just the right balance of humor, irony and tragedy. And no tourist guide or coffee table book will offer a more sensually pleasing portrait of the culture, food, language, and landscape of the place she now calls home."
      • premium: False
      • source: Arts Atlanta
      • content: "Under Magnolia is a vibrant example of Mayes' literary artistry. Her memoir teems with beautiful, pellucid vignettes, described with a painter's eye for detail, [about a young girl maturing to adulthood amidst domestic tumult]."
      • premium: False
      • source: Live Happy magazine
      • content: "A memoir of luminous language and sensory memory that explores the concept of home, the growth of a woman--and the pull of the South on all those who have experienced the scent of magnolias on a summer's night or a tall, frosty glass of sweet tea on the porch."
      • premium: False
      • source: Winnipeg Free Press
      • content: "With powerful, compact language and an uncanny skill with imagery, American writer Frances Mayes has raised the bar on writing memoirs."
      • premium: False
      • source: Palm Beach Daily News
      • content: "Mayes has the gift of transporting the reader to other worlds and vividly renders this visit to the South of a few decades ago."
      • premium: False
      • source: M/C Reviews
      • content: "A wonderful memoir, searingly honest, beautifully descriptive and totally compelling."
      • premium: False
      • source: Wellington City Libraries
      • content: "A landmark event."
      • premium: False
      • source: Publishers Weekly
      • content: "The prose is dazzling throughout...readers will not tire of Mayes' splendid imagery."
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus Reviews (starred)
      • content: "One of those books you want to devour but realize it's more satisfying to savor for as long as possible."
      • premium: False
      • source: Booklist
      • content: "A best-selling sensation worldwide, Mayes will galvanize readers with this...coming-of-age tale set on her home terrain."
      • premium: False
      • source: BookPage
      • content: "Under Magnolia is a gorgeous, dreamy remembrance of hot Southern afternoons, mothers in red lipstick and Shalimar, Elvis turned up loud to cover up the family troubles that ran deep. An unflinching love song to her simultaneously rich and troubled childhood, it is Mayes' most generous work yet."
      • premium: False
      • source: Enchanted Prose
      • content: "[The] writing is so sensory and poetic you're likely to find yourself, as I did, re-reading sentences over twice, three times, to catch the nuances, the meaning, the beauty... From the opening line, you're hooked."
      • premium: False
      • source: Pat Conroy, New York Times bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and The
      • content: "Like the rest of America, I fell in love with Tuscany and Italy when I read Frances Mayes's wondrous memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun. She followed her Tuscan books with a beautiful novel called Swan, which alerted me to her southern heritage. In her new southern memoir, Under Magnolia, Frances Mayes describes the birth of her extraordinary sensibility, the deep-pooled clarity of her writing, her giddy love of nature, and her sharp and satirical eye for those who brought her up to honorable womanhood in the tortured South of her girlhood. Her prose style is seamless to me and she writes in a royal style."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        April 14, 2014
        Set in the author's "one-mile-square" hometown of Fitzgerald in the backwoods of Georgia, Mayes's (Every Day in Tuscany) latest memoir depicts a childhood of rich meals and drunk, impatient parents—her adoring and violent father and her restless alcoholic mother. Mayes endures their "long night sieges," distracting herself with books and seeking comfort from Willie Bell, the family cook. The portrayal of Willie Bell is refreshingly unromantic, written with candor and respect as Mayes refers to her as an ally, adding "it was not a cozy, member-of-the-family thing she and I simply knew we were in it together." When Mayes refers to fleeing the South, her reasoning is more tied to ambition than victimhood. Her accounts of high school and college—first at Randolph-Macon, then at University of Florida—are teeming with tales of friendships and eager suitors. Though the prose is dazzling throughout, Mayes's best stories are the early ones. In an especially moving scene, she sits outside in a car while her father dies in the house. Her uncle urges her to come inside, saying "Sugar, you better go in and say good-bye." Readers will not tire of Mayes' splendid imagery. Agent: Peter Ginsberg, Curtis Brown. (Apr.)
         
        The White House: It's Historic Furnishings and First Families
        Betty C. Monkman
        Abbeville, $49.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-7892-1179-8
        1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, America's home address, is the subject of this comprehensive and celebratory tome covering more than 200 years of presidential and cultural history told through lavish full-color photography. With an informed eye and a scholarly devotion, Monkman, the White House curator for more than three decades, has assembled an impressive catalog of the art, furniture, china, silver, and other decor of all but one of the First Families that have resided there. (George Washington never slept there.) This second edition updates readers with previously unpublished pictures from the most recent Presidents' tenure including the book's Red Room as it looks today and also the current Oval office where you can see Barack Obama's Resolute desk, the same one used by Presidents Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and G.W. Bush. A rare stereographic portrait of a somber White House draped in mourning cloth from Washington upholsterers on the occasion of President Lincoln's death in April, 1865 is also in the new edition. Along with comprehensive coverage of the public rooms, there's an occasional peak at the private corners. Photos of the Lincoln bedroom, for example, provides a close-up of the elaborate rosewood headboard and gilded canopy of the Lincoln bed. Though Lincoln never slept there, he used the room as an upstairs office; Mrs. Lincoln bought the bed in 1861 for the presidential guest room. Lovers of history or the decorative arts, in particular, will find this book abundantly satisfying, but anyone with a national pride will appreciate and admire their "Family" heirlooms.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        March 15, 2014
        Mayes, adored for her famed Tuscany books (Under the Tuscan Sun, 1996; Every Day in Tuscany, 2010), mined the murky depths of her family's history for her first novel, Swan (2002). She now returns to the scene of the crimes in both literal and figurative senses. Her southern memoir is a tale straight out of Faulkner, rife with episodes of dissipation and disillusion, parents who loved and fought with equally wild abandon, and ancestors with names like Big Mama and Daddy Jack. While on a book tour in Oxford, Mississippi, Mayes realized her southern roots ran deeper than she believed or would have liked. But she and her husband were sufficiently compelled to relocate from Northern California to North Carolina, settling in a university town with a far enough remove to allow her an objective distance from which to analyze the signature episodes of her childhood. With her trademark skill for capturing the essence of place and time, Mayes candidly reveals a youth riddled with psychological abuse and parental neglect that, nevertheless, ignited a fiery passion for adventure and self-discovery. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A best-selling sensation worldwide, Mayes will galvanize readers with this vigorously promoted coming-of-age tale set on her home terrain.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

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shortDescription

A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region’s 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...

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      • description: Travel / United States / South / South Atlantic (DC, DE, FL, GA, MD, NC, SC, VA, WV)