Clear Springs: A Family Story - Softcover

Bobbie Ann Mason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060956291 ISBN 13: 9780060956295

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2020

Synopsis

People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because they ring so true. This dazzling memoir saga of three generations, their aspirations, their conflicts, and the ties that bound them to one another. Spanning decades, Clear Springs gracefully weaves together the stories of Mason's grandparents, parents, and her won generation. The narrative moves from the sober industriousness of a Kentucky farm to the hippie lifestyle of the countercultural 1960s; from a New York fan magazine to the shock-therapy ward of a mental institution; from a county poorhouse to the set of a Hollywood movie; from a small rustic schoolhouse to glittering pop music concerts. In the process of recounting her own odyssey--the story of a misfit girl who dreamed of distant places--Mason depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the twentieth century. Ultimately, Clear Springs is a heartfelt portrait of an extended family, and a profound affirmation of the importance of family love.

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:

People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because the stories she tells of family life ring true. In this dazzling memoir, Mason tells her own story -- a multilayered saga of three generations that recaptures 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. In Clear Springs, Mason writes about the lives of her parents and grandparents and gracefully weaves together several different lives, decades, and locales, moving from the sober industry of a Kentucky farm to the hippie lifestyle of the '60s New York counterculture to the shock-therapy ward of a mental institution; from a farmhouse to the set of a Hollywood movie; from a small rustic schoolhouse to pop music concerts. Mason depicts the changes that have come to family, to women, and to heartland America in the twentieth century, and tells her own odyssey -- how a misfit girl who only dreamed of distant places grew up and fulfilled her ambition to be a writer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0060956291
• ISBN 13: 9780060956295
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336