Dimestore: A Writer's Life
Lee Smith, 2016
Algonquin Books
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616205027
Summary
For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For forty-five years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story.
Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy’s dimestore. It was in that dimestore—listening to customers and inventing adventures for the store’s dolls—that she became a storyteller.
Even when she was sent off to college to earn some “culture,” she understood that perhaps the richest culture she might ever know was the one she was driving away from—and it’s a place that she never left behind.
Dimestore’s fifteen essays are crushingly honest, wise and perceptive, and superbly entertaining. Smith has created both a moving personal portrait and a testament to embracing one’s heritage. It’s also an inspiring story of the birth of a writer and a poignant look at a way of life that has all but vanished. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 1, 1944
• Where—Grundy, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A. Hollins College
• Awards—O. Henry Award (twice) (more below)
• Currently—lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina
Lee Smith is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.
Early life and education
Lee Smith was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia, a small coal-mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, less than 10 miles from the Kentucky border. The Smith home sat on Main Street, and the Levisa Fork River ran just behind it. Her mother, Gig, was a college graduate who had come to Grundy to teach school. Her father, Ernest, was the owner and operator of a Ben Franklin store in Grundy.
Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing—and selling, for a nickel apiece—stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers."
After spending her last two years of high school at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, Virginia, Smith enrolled at Hollins College in Roanoke. She and fellow student Annie Dillard (the well-known essayist and novelist) became go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs. In 1966, her senior year at Hollins, Smith submitted an early draft of a coming-of-age novel to a Book-of-the-Month Club contest and was awarded one of twelve fellowships. Two years later, that novel, The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed (1968), became Smith's first published work of fiction.
Following her graduation from Hollins, Smith married James Seay, a poet and teacher, whom she accompanied from university to university as his teaching assignments changed. They had two sons. In 1981, however, the marriage broke up, and she accepted a teaching job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she taught for many years. In 1985, by then divorced from Seay, married journalist Hal Crowther. The couple currently lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Writing
Since 1968, Smith has published fifteen novels, as well as four collections of short stories, and has received eight major writing awards including the Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature in 2013.
Novels
1968 - The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed
1971 - Something in the Wind
1980 - Black Mountain Breakdown
1983 - Oral History
1985 - Family Linen
1988 - Fair and Tender Ladies
1992 - The Devil's Dream
1995 - Saving Grace
1996 - The Christmas Letters
2003 - The Last Girls
2006 - On Agate Hill
2013 - Guests on Earth
Short story collections
1981 - Cakewalk
1990 - Me and My Baby View the Eclipse
1997 - News of the Spirit
2010 - Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
Memoir
2016 - Dimestore: A Writer’s Life
Recognition
Smith has received numerous writing awards, including the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the Mercy University Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature (the first recipient.) (Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/30/2016.)
Book Reviews
[H]eartwarming…. Dimestore shares the habits that may have saved Smith from her own tendency to get too “wrought up,” one of which was to approach storytelling “the way other people write in their journals,” in order to make it through the night. Fiction became her lifelong outlet, a means of sustaining and reaffirming the connection to her work, as well as a way to preserve the rich mountain culture she so loved as a child.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dimestore may prove to be a work that connects wildly with readers. Because truth is often more powerful than fiction, and because the tale she has actually lived so far to tell is rendered keenly, irrepressibly and without self-pity. Lee Smith, the person, emerges as one of nonfiction’s great protagonists.
Raleigh News & Observer
Now, at last, we have Dimestore: A Writer’s Life, a seasoned, open-hearted memoir…. Yes, Lee Smith is a writer, and without that, we probably would not have this engrossing memoir. But at heart, Lee Smith is a woman – openhearted, spirited, humble – and it is those qualities especially that inspire and make us glad as we read.
Charlotte Observer
[P]rofoundly readable.... Like her novels, Smith’s memoir is intimate, as though writer and reader are sitting together on a front-porch swing. She writes in the rich vernacular of her youth. Smith’s details are so piercingly remembered, so vividly set on the page, that I felt wrapped in a great blanket of familiarity. Her memoir is a warm, poignant read about a lost time and place, a love of books and a celebration of the quirks and oddities of home.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
[E]ntertaining and poignant collection of Southern memories.... Throughout it all, Smith weaves in her candid observations on the changing South and how she developed into a Southern writer, spurred on by the likes of Eudora Welty.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Smith at her finest. There is not one false note in the book....wonderful...filled with tenderness, compassion, love, and humor.... [H]ighly recommended for....readers who are interested in the changes in small-town America.
Library Journal
Candid and unsentimental, Smith's book sheds light on her beginnings as writer while revealing her resilience and personal transformations over the course of a remarkable lifetime. A warm, poignant memoir from a reliably smooth voice.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start discussion for Dimestore...and then take off on your own:
1. As a child, Lee Smith dreamed of being in the South of France, drawing on a cigarette, "hollow-cheeked and haunted." How do childhood dreams inspire a life? Have you ever had such dreams...and followed them...or wanted to?
2. Talk about Lee's family. How, for example, did Lee's mother's own upbringing clash with her daughter's tendency to accept and blend into the culture of southwest Virginian?
3. Trace Lee Smith's journey as a writer, who when told to write what she knew, thought, "All I knew was that I was not going to write about Grundy, Va., ever, that was for sure." How did she reverse that decision and come to embrace her heritage?
4. Follow-up to Question 3: Describe Lee's growing up years. Would you consider them idyllic? How did her youthful experiences come to shape her writing?
5. Talk, especially, about the dolls in her father's store and the way she invented "long, complicated life stories for them." Consider, too, the role of the one-way mirror through which she watched customers. What did it teach her about writing?
6. What the impact did other Southern writers have on Lee's development as a writer: Faulkner, Styron, Welty and Sill. How did she begin to see her own life in Grundy, Virginia, as "stories"?
7. What role does mental illness play in Lee's family life?
8. In what way did fiction became an outlet for Smith, a habit that saved her from getting "too wrought up." How did her writing eventually became an affirmation of life in Grundy and a way to preserve the mountain culture?
9. Lee says that "most of us are always searching, through our work and in our lives: for meaning, for love, for home." Is that the role of writers...to help us understand where we come from?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime use these, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)