Clear Springs: A Memoir - Hardcover

Mason, Bobbie Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679449256 ISBN 13: 9780679449256

Publisher: Random House, 1999

Synopsis

In this superb memoir, the bestselling author of In Country and other award-winning books tells her own story, and the story of a Kentucky farm family, the Masons of Clear Springs. Like Russell Baker's Growing Up, Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain, and other classic literary memoirs, Clear Springs takes us back in time to recapture a way of life that has all but disappeared, a country culture deeply rooted in work and food and family, in common sense and music and the land. Clear Springs is also an American woman's odyssey, exploring how a misfit girl who dreamed of distant places grew up in the forties, fifties, and sixties, and fulfilled her ambition to be a writer.
        
A multilayered narrative of three generations--Bobbie Ann Mason, her parents and grandparents--Clear Springs gracefully interlaces several different lives, decades, and locales, moving from the industrious life on a Kentucky farm to travels around the South with Mason as president of the Hilltoppers Fan Club; from the hippie lifestyle of the 1960s New York counterculture to the shock-therapy ward of a mental institution; from a farmhouse to the set of a Hollywood movie; from pop music concerts to a small rustic schoolhouse. Clear Springs depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the twentieth century, as well as to Bobbie Ann Mason herself. When the movie of Mason's bestselling novel In Country is filmed near Clear Springs, it brings the first limousines to town, even as it brings out once again the wisdom and values of Mason's remarkable parents. Her mother,  especially, stands at the center of this book. Mason's journey leads her to a recognition of the drama and significance of her mother's life and to a new understanding of heritage, place, and family roots.
        
Brilliant and evocative, Clear Springs is a stunning achievement.

About this title

Review:

Bobbie Ann Mason's marvelously tactile and textured memoir has the same blunt yet supple prose that distinguishes her novels In Country and Feather Crowns. Examining her roots in rural Kentucky, where she was born in 1940, Mason unravels her family's history and considers its impact on her as a person and a writer. Readers of the New Yorker will recognize a few excerpts, most notably the magical chapter on a local pop group in particular, and the siren song of rock & roll in general. Mason has woven the pieces of her story into a seamless whole limning her ambivalent relationship to her country roots. She was a bookish girl who fled to college and the sophisticated North before realizing that her fictional material and her heart were still down South. But when she bought land in Kentucky, it was "a long way from [home]. I had to keep some distance, keep my options open." Although her immediate family members all get loving, unsentimental treatment, the book is in essence a tribute to Mason's mother, whose free spirit never had a chance to roam as her daughter's did and who grabs center stage in the final chapter. This memoir is quintessential Mason in its strong storytelling, seeming simplicity, and deep mystery. --Wendy Smith

From the Back Cover:

"One of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader."
--The New York Review of Books about Shiloh and Other Stories

Praise for Feather Crowns

"A wonderful novel . . . riveting . . . memorable and complete."

--The New York Times Book Review

Praise for In Country

"A novel that, like a flashbulb, burns an afterimage in our minds."
         --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A brilliant and moving book . . . a moral tale that entwines public history with private anguish."
--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"I'm still under the spell of In Country--a wonderful experience starting right on the first page."
         --Anne Tyler

Praise for Shiloh and Other Stories

"A gentle touch does not preclude exceptionally sharp observation; in her deft, witty and unobtrusive way Mason is amazingly acute."

--Alice Adams

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679449256
• ISBN 13: 9780679449256
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296